Seminar by Professor Martha Fineman to discuss her article
'The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Subject'

Friday 18 June 2010, 11.30am-1pm
Institute of Governance, 63 University Road, Seminar Room 1

Professor Fineman will discuss her recent article in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, entitled “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Subject”, with a particular focus on the implications for children.

To book a place, and for further information, please contact Prof Laura Lundy by Monday 14th June.

Martha Albertson Fineman is an internationally renowned law and society scholar and a leading authority in feminist legal theory and family law. She is currently Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University, which is that institution’s highest honour bestowed on a faculty member. Fineman also directs the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, which she founded in 1984. The Feminism and Legal Theory Project nurtures scholars from around the world, bringing them together to study and debate a wide range of topics related to feminist theory and law.

Before coming to Emory in 2004, Fineman was the first Dorothea S. Clarke Professor of Feminist Jurisprudence at Cornell Law School. The Clarke professorship is the first endowed chair in feminist jurisprudence at a law school in the United States. From 1990-1999, Fineman was on faculty at Columbia Law School, where she held the Maurice T. Moore chair, and from 1976-1990, she was on faculty at University of Wisconsin Law School. Fineman has a B.A. from Temple University and a J.D. from the University of Chicago. She clerked for the Hon. Luther M. Swygert of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Please click here to view the website for the 'Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative' at Emory.

Her books are The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency (The New Press 2003); The Neutered Mother, the Sexual Family, and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies (Routledge 1995); and The Illusion of Equality: The Rhetoric and Reality of Divorce Reform (University of Chicago Press 1991). Fineman has also co-edited the following critical legal theory volumes: Feminist and Queer Legal Theory: Intimate Encounters, Uncomfortable Conversations (forthcoming Ashgate 2009, co-editors Jack E. Jackson and Adam P. Romero); What’s Right for Children: The Competing Paradigms of Religion and Human Rights (forthcoming Ashgate 2008; co-editor Karen Worthington); Feminism Confronts Homo Economicus: Gender, Law, and Society (Cornell University Press 2005; co-editor Terrance Doherty); Feminism, Media, and the Law (Oxford University Press 1997; co-editor Martha T. McCluskey); Mothers in Law (Columbia University Press 1995; co-editor Isabel Karpin); The Public Nature of Private Violence: Women and the Discovery of Abuse (Routledge 1994, co-editor Roxanne Mykitiuk); At the Boundaries of Law: Feminism and Legal Theory (Routledge 1990, co-editor Nancy Sweet Thomadsen).