Vera Bergelson specializes in criminal law theory. She has written about consent, provocation, self-defense, necessity, victimless crime, and human trafficking. Her book about the relationship between a perpetrator and victim raises questions about comparative liability in criminal law. She was a Fulbright specialist at Hebrew University, a visiting scholar at Melbourne University Law School, and has attended numerous international conferences.

Professor Bergelson earned her diploma in Slavic languages and literatures with distinction from Moscow State University and her Ph.D. in philology from the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies in Moscow, Russia. She earned her J.D. cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she was on the Law Review and was named to the Order of the Coif.

Professor Bergelson has been a lecturer at Moscow State University, the Polish Cultural Center, and the Literary Institute in Moscow. Before joining the Rutgers faculty in 2001, she was an associate with Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in New York. She is fluent in Russian and Polish and has a reading proficiency in Bulgarian, Belorussian, and Ukranian.