Catharine A. MacKinnon

James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law

Research Interests

• Constitutional Law
• International and comparative law
• Legal Activism
• Legal, Social, and Political Theory
• Sex Equality (sex,; gender; sexuality)

Appointments

• Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School

Additional Information

Visiting Professor MacKinnon will teach Sex Equality and the reading group International Criminal Court in the Fall Term 2009.

Biographical Statement

Catharine A. MacKinnon is a lawyer, teacher, writer, and activist on sex equality issues domestically and internationally. She is Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and Special Gender Adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Widely published in many languages, her dozen books include, Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979), Feminism Unmodified (1987), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), Only Words (1993), Women's Lives, Men's Laws (2005), Are Women Human? (2006), and her casebook Sex Equality (2001/2007). 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. Her approach to equality has been largely accepted in Canada and elsewhere. Representing Bosnian women survivors of Serbian sexual atrocities, she established legal recognition of rape as an act of genocide an won with co-counsel a $745 million verdict at trial. She works with Equality Now, an international NGO promoting sex equality worldwide, and the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW).

Representative Publications

• "Women's September 11th: Rethinking the International Law of Conflict," 47 Harv. Int'l L. J. 1 (2006)
• Women's Lives, Men's Laws (Harvard University Press, 2005)
• "Pornography as Trafficking," 26 Mich. J. Int'l L. 993 (2005)
• "The Straight Road: A Tribute to Burke Marshall," 113 Yale L. J. 811 (2004)
• "Mainstreaming Feminism in Legal Education," 53 J. Legal Educ. 199 (2003)