Quinesha Bentley

Quinesha Bentley is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 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, policymakers, and regulatory institutions construct value, allocate risk, exercise discretion, and produce unequal legal and social outcomes through systems of legal governance.

Bentley is particularly interested in professional authority and expertise, examining how individuals become recognized as legitimate authorities capable of determining the monetary value of human injury, death, and suffering; how experts perceive, interpret, and justify the valuation of human life; and how these processes shape systems of compensation, legal recognition, institutional governance, and public policy. She studies these dynamics across interconnected domains including wrongful death litigation, actuarial valuation, insurance systems, policing, punishment, and civil and criminal legal institutions. Her work examines how legal rules, expert testimony, professional discretion, and institutional decision-making shape the valuation of human life, the distribution of compensation and punishment, and broader patterns of racial and social inequality.

Methodologically, Bentley employs mixed-methods approaches, combining in-depth interviews with legal professionals, expert witnesses, policymakers, and other institutional actors; ethnographic courtroom observation; archival and legal analysis; and quantitative analyses of civil litigation, actuarial tables, insurance systems, and legal decision-making.