Martha Albertson Fineman

Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law

Martha Albertson Fineman is a Robert W. Woodruff Professor. An internationally recognized law and society scholar, Fineman is a leading authority on family law and feminist jurisprudence. Following graduation from University of Chicago Law School in 1975, she clerked for the Hon. Luther M. Swygert of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Fineman began her teaching career at the University of Wisconsin in 1976. In 1990, she moved to Columbia University where she was the Maurice T. Moore Professor. Before coming to Emory, she was on the Cornell Law School faculty where she held the Dorothea Clarke Professorship, the first endowed chair in the nation in feminist jurisprudence.

Fineman is founder and director of the Feminism and Legal Theory (FLT) Project, which was inaugurated in 1984. The two most recent collections from the FLT Project edited by Fineman are: What Is Right For Children? The Competing Paradigms Religion and International Human Rights (with Worthington) and Feminist and Queer Legal Theories: Intimate Encounters, Uncomfortable Conversation (with Jackson and Romero), both published by Ashgate Press in 2009. Fineman also serves as co-director of Emory’s Race and Difference Initiative and is the director of one of its sub-initiatives—the Vulnerability Studies Project.

Her scholarly interests are the legal regulation of family and intimacy and the legal implications of universal dependency and vulnerability. Fineman's solely authored publications include books—The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency, The New Press (2004); The Neutered Mother, and The Sexual Family and other Twentieth Century Tragedies, Routledge Press (1995); and The Illusion of Equality: The Rhetoric and Reality of Divorce Reform (1991)—in addition to dozens of journal articles and essays. Her essay in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition,” will form the basis of a book to be published by Princeton University Press in 2010.

Fineman has received awards for her writing and teaching, including the prestigious Harry Kalvin Prize for her work in the law and society tradition. She has served on several government study commissions. She teaches courses and seminars on family law, feminist jurisprudence, law and sexuality, and reproductive issues. For more information, visit www.law.emory.edu/flt.

Education: BA, Temple University, 1971; JD, University of Chicago, 1975.