A creative and cross-disciplinary scholar, Amy J. Cohen brings a range of qualitative and historical research methods to bear on two areas of legal scholarship—mediation and conflict resolution, including among organizers building alternatives to the criminal legal system, and law and economic development, including the law and political economy of agriculture and food. She joins UNSW from the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law where she is the John. C. Elam/Vorys Sater Professor of Law.

Amy has held visiting professorships at Harvard Law School, Osgoode Hall Law School, the University of Turin, Faculty of Law, and the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, and she has held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the American Institute of Indian Studies at the University of Chicago, the Fulbright Program, and the Collegio Carlo Alberto.

Her articles have appeared in interdisciplinary publications, such as Law and Social Inquiry, Law, Culture, and the Humanities, NOMOS, and Political and Legal Anthropology Review, as well as in a number of US-based law reviews, such as Texas Law Review, Law and Contemporary Problems, and Minnesota Law Review.  

After law school, she taught at the Kathmandu School of Law in Nepal as a Fulbright scholar, clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver, Colorado, and worked on community development initiatives in Ghana, Nepal, and Thailand..