Participants
 

Caroline Bettinger-López
Associate Professor of Clinical Legal Education and Director, Human Rights Clinic, University of Miami School of Law
Caroline Bettinger-López's scholarship, advocacy, and teaching focus on international human rights law and advocacy, including the implementation of human rights norms at the domestic level. Her main regional focus is the United States and Latin America, and her principal areas of interest include violence against women, gender and race discrimination, and immigrants' rights. Professor Bettinger-López regularly litigates and engages in other forms of advocacy in the Inter-American Human Rights system, federal and state courts and legislative bodies, and the United Nations. Professor Bettinger-López also speaks regularly at conferences and programs on international human rights, women's rights, and clinical teaching, consults with US NGOs on mechanisms for incorporating human rights into domestic advocacy, and coordinates conferences, trainings, and workshops on human rights. At Miami Law, she directs the Human Rights Clinic, which will launch in January 2011 and will focus on transnational and international human rights litigation and advocacy in the US, Latin America, the Caribbean and other regions. Prior to joining Miami Law, Professor Bettinger-López was the Deputy Director of the Human Rights Institute and Lecturer-in-Law and Acting Director of the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School.   

Lisa Crooms
Professor of Law, Howard University School of Law
Lisa Crooms teaches Constitutional Law, Gender and the Law, International Human Rights Law and Supreme Court Jurisprudence. A human rights activist since 1984, Professor Crooms has worked with the Washington Office on Africa and the American Committee on Africa. She is currently a board member for the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, the US Human Rights Network and the Women's Institute for Leadership Development for Human Rights. She is also a coordinator of the US coordinated Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) 2007 shadow report to the United Nations' Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. In 2006, she served in the same capacity for a similar effort regarding U.S. compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Professor Crooms has served as an advisor to institutions including The Urban Justice Center, Unifem, the Sentencing Project, the International Human Rights Law Group (Global Rights) and Amnesty International - USA. In 2003, Professor Crooms was a Fulbright Scholar at the Norman Manley Law School - University of the West Indies, Mona Campus in Jamaica, where she conducted research on the relationship among gender, violence and law in the construction of Jamaican post-independence national identity

Martha Davis
Professor and Associate Dean for Clinical and Experiential Education, Northeastern University School of Law
Associate Dean Davis teaches Women's Rights Lawyering, Constitutional Law and Professional Responsibility. She is also a faculty director for the law school's Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy. Professor Davis has written widely on women's rights, poverty and human rights. In addition to her numerous articles, she recently co-edited Bringing Human Rights Home, a three-volume work chronicling the US human rights movement.  In 2008, Bringing Human Rights Home was named one of the "best books in the field of human rights" by the US Human Rights Network; an abridged version was published in 2009 by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Zanita Fenton
Professor of Law, University of Miami School of Law
Zanita Fenton she teaches courses in Constitutional Law, Family Law, Torts, Race and the Law, and seminars in Critical Race Feminism and in the Reproductive Technologies. Professor Fenton's scholarly interests cover issues of subordination, focusing on those of race, gender and class. She explores these issues in the greater contexts of understanding violence and in the attainment of justice. She writes in these areas and regularly speaks concerning these and related topics in both national and international fora. She has long served as an advocate and consultant for survivors of domestic abuse. After graduating from Harvard Law Schoolk, Professor Fenton practiced briefly in the New York firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton and then served as a law clerk to the Honorable Edward  Korman, United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

The Honorable Nancy Gertner
US District Court for the District of Massachusetts
Nancy Gertner was appointed to the federal bench in 1994 by President Clinton. Judge Gertner has traveled widely, teaching women's rights and human rights.  She has been on the faculty of the American Bar Association - Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative (ABA-CEELI) and is now on its advisory board. She has taught judges from the former Soviet Union, including those from the Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Central Asia (Tajikistan, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan). In 1999, she was part of a delegation of lawyers and judges from the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law to Turkey, exploring human rights issues and issues concerning judicial independence. In 2001 and again in 2002, she participated in programs co-sponsored by the Ministry of Justice in Israel and Fordham University Law School. She has also worked with Yale Law School's China Project and The Spangenberg Group and Wellesley Centers for Women traveling to China on several occasions, and to Vietnam, to participate in seminars co‑organized with the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and The All China Women's Federation. In 2005, she traveled to Cambodia to train lawyers who were to appear before the War Crimes Tribunal dealing with the Khmer Rouge. In 2008, she was part of a delegation to Liberia to address the reconstruction of their legal system after 14 years of civil war. Recently, she has been working with Chinese judges and scholars on sentencing reform.

Leigh Goodmark
Associate Professor of Law and Director, Family Law Clinic, University of Baltimore
Leigh Goodmark is Associate Professor and co-director of the Center on Applied Feminism at the University of Baltimore School of Law. She teaches Family Law and supervises students representing clients in the Family Law Clinic. Her forthcoming book, A Troubled Marriage: Domestic Violence and the Legal System, will be published soon by New York University Press. Professor Goodmark has many publications to her credit, including When is a Battered Woman Not a Battered Woman? When She Fights Back; Going Underground: The Ethics of Advising a Battered Woman Fleeing an Abusive Relationship; Achieving Batterer Accountability in the Child Protection System, Law Is the Answer? Do We Know That For Sure?: Questioning the Efficacy of Legal Interventions for Battered Women. From 2000 to 2003, Professor Goodmark was the Director of the Children and Domestic Violence Project at the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law. Before joining the Center on Children and the Law, she represented battered women and children in the District of Columbia in custody, visitation, child support, restraining order, and other civil matters. Professor Goodmark is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Law School.

Cheryl Hanna
Professor of Law, Vermont Law School
Cheryl Hanna is co-author of Domestic Violence and the Law: Theory and Practice with Elizabeth Schneider, Clare Dalton, and Judi Greenberg. She will be a visiting professor at Seattle University in fall 2010, and has also been a visitor at Hastings College of Law. A graduate of Harvard Law School and Kalamazoo College, her extensive work on the status of women and girls in America has been widely cited by courts, including by the United States Supreme Court, and by the national press. She teaches Constitutional Law and Women and the Law. She is a frequent contributor to the media and is a commentator on Vermont Public Radio. She currently serves as president of the board for the Snelling Center for Government. 

Vicki Jackson
Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law, Georgetown University Law School
Vicki Jackson is currently a visiting professor at Harvard Law School (2010-2011). She received her JD from Yale, clerked for US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and practiced law for several years before entering academia. She teaches constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, federal courts, the Supreme Court, and on gender-related subjects. She has been the Felix Frankfurter Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and the Samuel Rubin Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School and has served as an associate dean at Georgetown. Her books include Constitutional Engagement in a Transnational Era; Federal Courts Stories (co-editor with Judith Resnik); Inside the Supreme Court: The Institution and Its Procedures (2d. ed.) (co-author with Susan Low Bloch and Thomas G. Krattenmaker); Comparative Constitutional Law (2d ed.) (co-author with Mark Tushnet); and Defining the Field of Comparative Constitutional Law (co-editor with Mark Tushnet). She has written scholarly essays and articles on such topics as federalism, sovereign immunity, comparative constitutional law, freedom of speech, constitutional interpretation, gender equality and transnational discourse, and citizenship and federalism. Her public service and pro bono activities are extensive, including serving as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel in the US Department of Justice; as a member of the managerial board of trustees of the International Association of Women Judges; and as co-chair of the Special Committee on Gender, DC Circuit Task Force on Gender, Race and Ethnic Bias.

Lois Kanter
Clinical Professor and Executive Director, Domestic Violence Institute, Northeastern University School of Law
Professor Kanter is an expert in domestic violence prevention and legal responses to sexual assault. She has developed a range of clinical education experiences for students. She currently directs the school's Domestic Violence Institute as well as its Domestic Violence Clinic in Dorchester Municipal Court, the Boston Medical Center Domestic Violence Project, and is a founding member, and former chair, of the board of directors of the Victim Rights Law Center, an innovative organization providing legal services to rape victims. She is also a founding partner, and Northeastern's representative, on interdisciplinary, community-based partnerships to assist victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.

Martha Minow
Dean of the Faculty of Law and Jeremiah Smith Jr. Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Martha Minow has taught at Harvard Law School since 1981 in the areas of civil procedure and constitutional law.  An expert in human rights and advocacy for members of racial and religious minorities and for women, children, and persons with disabilities, she also writes about a civil procedure, government outsourcing, management of mass torts, and military law. She is the author or editor of 12 books and more than 150 articles. Her most recent book is In Brown's Wake: Legacies of America's Constitutional Landmark  (2010). Dean Minow served on the Independent International Commission Kosovo and helped to launch Imagine Co-existence, a program of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, to promote peaceful development in post-conflict societies. Her five-year partnership with the federal Department of Education and the Center for Applied Special Technology worked to increase access to the curriculum for students with disabilities. She chairs the board of directors for the Revson Foundation (New York) and serves on the boards of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, the Covenant Foundation sponsoring Jewish education, Facing History and Ourselves, and was recently sworn in to the board of directors of the national Legal Services Corporation.

Deborah Rhode
Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law and Director, Stanford Center on the Legal Profession, Stanford Law School
Deborah Rhode's teaching and research focuses on gender inequality and legal ethics. She is the former president of the Association of American Law Schools, the former chair of the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession, the former founding director of Stanford's Center on Ethics, a former trustee of Yale University and the former director of Stanford's Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She also served as senior counsel to the minority members of the Judiciary Committee, the United States House of Representatives, on presidential impeachment issues during the Clinton administration. She is the most frequently cited scholar on legal ethics, and writes for general as well as scholarly audiences in leading academic journals and in newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, Slate, The Washington Post, The American Lawyer and The National Law Journal.

Elizabeth Schneider
Rose L. Hoffer Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School
Elizabeth Schneider teaches and writes in the fields of federal civil litigation, gender law and domestic violence. She is the author of Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking (Yale University Press 2000), which won the 2000 Association of American Publishers Professional-Scholarly Publishing Award in Law, co-editor of Women and the Law Stories (Foundation Press, forthcoming 2010) (with Stephanie M. Wildman), and co-author of the law school casebook Domestic Violence and the Law: Theory and Practice (Foundation Press, 2nd ed. 2008) (2009 Supplement) (with Cheryl Hanna, Judith G. Greenberg and Clare Dalton). She has also published many articles in leading law reviews. Professor Schneider is co-chair of the Domestic Violence Committee of the National Association of Women Judges (NAWJ) and a frequent commentator for both print and broadcast media. She lectures widely in the United States and abroad on issues of gender and law and domestic violence, and was a consultant for the Secretary-General's In-Depth Study of All Forms of Violence Against Women, presented to the United Nations General Assembly in 2006.

Ann Shalleck
Director of the Women and the Law Program, Carrington Shields Scholar, American University Washington College of Law
Ann Shalleck founded and directs the Women and the Law Program and Women and International Law Program at Washington College of Law. She teaches and writes in the areas of feminist jurisprudence, clinical theory, family law and legal pedagogy. The Women and the Law Program coordinates a curriculum offering specialized courses on gender and law and providing integration of gender-related issues throughout the curriculum; organizes workshops for scholars and advocates; and works with students on involvement in advocacy, development of professional identities, and participation in law school. The program established LLM specializations in gender studies, created projects on Integrating Gender into Legal Education and Law in Latin America and India, and works on the development of study and teaching in comparative family law and on the household in the global economy. Professor Shalleck writes and lectures extensively about gender and the law, clinical education, gender and international law, and family law.

Emily Spieler
Dean and Edwin W. Hadley Professor of Law, Northeastern University School of Law
Appointed to head the School of Law in 2002, Dean Spieler is a leading authority on employment law and social insurance systems. During the winter of 2008-2009, she served on President Obama’s transition team for the Department of Labor. She has also served on the National Academy of Social Insurance Steering Committee on Workers’ Compensation; on the National Academies Committee on Health and Safety Needs of Older Workers; as chair of the US Department of Energy Worker Advocacy Advisory Committee regarding implementation of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act of 2000; and on the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Institute for Work and Health (Toronto). She is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, ex-officio member of the American Law Institute, and fellow and member of the board of governors of the College of Workers' Compensation Lawyers. 

Zipporah Wiseman
Thomas H. Law Centennial Professor of Law, University of Texas School of Law at Austin
An expert in commercial law, Zipporah Wiseman also teaches and writes on issues in feminist legal theory. She is co-author of Commercial Law: Cases and Materials (Little, Brown, 2nd ed., 1982), co-editor of Representing Women: Law, Literature and Feminism (Duke, 1994), and author of several articles, including “The Limits of Vision: Karl Llewellyn and the Merchant Rules″ (Harvard Law Review, 1987). Professor Wiseman has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School; Washington College of Law ,American University; Boston College Law School; University of San Diego Institute of International and Comparative Law, Paris, France and London; and L'Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. Prior to joining the University of Texas faculty, Professor Wiseman was a member of the faculty at Northeastern University School of Law.