Cristina Violante

My dissertation examines the practice and theory of statutory interpretation in the United States. I aim to both describe how statutes have been read historically and for what reasons, and provide a normative account of how they should be read that moves beyond the textualist-purposivist debate.

My secondary area of research is in property, specifically the history of water law and environmental commodification in settler colonial contexts. I look at how the law creates and embeds social hierarchies, acts as a means of appropriating the natural world, and draws selectively from science to make claims to objectivity in the process.

My work was awarded the American Bar Foundation’s Graduate Student Paper Award and has been published in Law and Social Inquiry and Journal of Palestine Studies. I was previously a fellow in the National Science Foundation’s Environment and Society: Data Science for the 21st Century program, and have received numerous Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships.

During the 2025-26 school year I am a doctoral fellow at the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory and the Honors Teaching Fellow for the Legal Studies Honors Program at U.C. Berkeley.