Quinesha Bentley

Quinesha Bentley is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. Her research examines how legal and administrative institutions determine the value of human life. As a sociologist, she studies how courts, governments, insurers, corporations, and other institutions quantify harm, assign responsibility, and translate injury, death, and loss into legal, economic, and administrative value. Using cases ranging from civil litigation and mass shootings to environmental hazards, product liability, policing, and criminal justice, her work explores how professional expertise and institutional decision-making shape inequality and public policy. Her scholarship sits at the intersection of sociology, jurisprudence, law, public policy, and economics, examining how legal institutions, state power, professional authority, and systems of racial governance shape the valuation of human life across civil and criminal legal contexts.

Drawing from sociology, sociolegal studies, and jurisprudence, Bentley studies valuation—the social processes through which importance, worth, and significance are assigned to people, ideas, practices, and institutions. Her research investigates commensuration, classification, professional authority, and legal decision-making to understand how injury, death, punishment, and loss become measurable, compensable, and actionable through systems of law. More broadly, she examines how courts, legal professionals, expert witnesses, insurers, policymakers, and regulatory institutions construct value, allocate risk, exercise discretion, and produce unequal legal and social outcomes.

Bentley is particularly interested in the sociology of professional authority and expertise, examining how individuals become recognized as legitimate authorities capable of determining the monetary value of human injury, death, and suffering. She explores how expertise, legal rules, and institutional discretion shape systems of compensation, legal recognition, governance, and public policy. Across projects on wrongful death litigation, actuarial valuation, insurance systems, mass violence, environmental governance, and civil and criminal legal institutions, her research investigates how these processes produce unequal distributions of compensation, responsibility, and justice.