Bach, Wendy A.
Area of Interest
Scholarship Focus
The interaction between systems of support and care and systems of punishment in poor communities.
Wendy A. Bach
Co-Director, AJRC | College of Law
Wendy A. Bach (College of Law) teaches and writes at the intersection of poverty law, criminal law, social welfare provision, law and society, and community lawyering. She has been with UT Law since fall 2010. From 2005 to 2010, she taught at the City University of New York School of Law. Before entering the academy, she was director of the Homelessness Outreach and Prevention Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York City and a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Brooklyn. Professor Bach has dedicated her career to representing children and families in poor communities in a variety of legal settings. Her scholarship focuses on the interaction between systems of support and care and systems of punishment in poor communities. She has been published in the William and Mary, Wisconsin, Brooklyn, and Michigan Law reviews, The Florida Tax Review and The Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. Her first book Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care was published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press. She is currently leading a national study of the criminalization of pregnancy after the Supreme Court’s decision overruling Roe v. Wade. As a child of Jewish European immigrants, Bach is a perennial expat in communities where she lives, but she is thrilled to live, work, and be in community in Central Appalachia.