Martha Albertson Fineman

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 honor 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. Fineman is an affiliated scholar of the Center for American Progress.

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.

Fineman has published widely, and, according to one study, is the eighth most cited scholar of critical legal theory. 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: Strange Bedfellows?: An Uncomfortable Conversation in Feminist and Queer Legal Theory (forthcoming 2008, co-editors Jack E. Jackson and Adam P. Romero); What’s Right for Children: The Competing Paradigms of Religion and Human Rights (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). At the Boundaries of Law is the first volume of feminst legal theory.

Fineman is the recipient of numerous scholarly awards, including most recently the 2008 Cook Award from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. She is also the recipient of the prestigious Harry Kalven Prize, awarded by the Law and Society Association to a scholar whose body of “empirical scholarship has contributed most effectively to the advancement of research in law and society.”