catharine mackinnon
Catharine A. MacKinnon is a lawyer, teacher, writer, and activist on sex equality domestically and internationally. She is Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, James Barr Ames Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, long term, and Special Gender Adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. She has taught at twelve law schools including Yale, Stanford, Chicago, Osgoode Hall (Toronto), Columbia, and Hebrew University (Jerusalem), been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Berlin, 1992-1993) and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford, 2005-2006). Widely published in many languages, her dozen books include Sex Equality (2001/2007), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), Only Words (1993), Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979), and in the last two years, Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws (2005) and Are Women Human? (2006).
She created the concept that sexual abuse violates equality rights, pioneering the legal claim for sexual harassment as sex discrimination and, with Andrea Dworkin, recognition of the harms of pornography as civil rights violations. Representing Bosnian women survivors of Serbian genocidal sexual atrocities, she established legal recognition of rape as an act of genocide and won with co-counsel a $745 million verdict at trial. She works with Equality Now, an international NGO promoting sex equality worldwide. Empirical studies document that Professor MacKinnon is one of the most widely-cited legal scholars in the English language.
Check out a great review of Catharine's visit to Dartmouth during October 2009.
Photo courtesy of Khatidja Dhala, CICC
