Speakers, Fall 2008 Conference: Child Centered Jurisprudence and Feminist Jurisprudence: Exploring the Connections and the Tensions

Prof. Annette Ruth Appell
Associate Dean of Clinical Affairs and Professor of Law, Washington University School of Law

Dean Appell earned her J.D. in 1986 from Northwestern University School of Law and her B.A. from Cornell University. At Northwestern, she was a member of the Northwestern Journal of International Law and Business. Before entering academia, she practiced law in Chicago as an associate of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal and Meites, Frackman, Mulder, Burger & Mollica and as an attorney and guardian ad litem at the Office of the Public Guardian of Cook County. She then taught at the Northwestern University School of Law and the University of South Carolina School of Law. Professor Appell’s areas of expertise include child welfare, adoption, child advocacy, and the rights of children and parents. She teaches the Child Welfare Clinic and Constitutional Law I.

Prof. Martha Albertson Fineman, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law

Martha Albertson Fineman is the newest Woodruff Professor, the highest honor Emory can bestow on a faculty member. 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, Fineman clerked for the Hon. Luther M. Swygert of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and then taught at University of Wisconsin and Columbia University. She joined Cornell Law School in 1999 to become the first endowed Chair in the nation in Feminist Jurisprudence.

Her scholarly interest is in the legal regulation of intimacy. Fineman is founder and director of the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, which was inaugurated in 1984. Fineman's publications include The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency, The New Press (2003); "Taking Children's Interest Seriously," Nomos; "Why Marriage?" University of Virginia Journal of Law and Social Policy (2001); The Neutered Mother, and The Sexual Family and other Twentieth Century Tragedies, Routledge Press (1995). She has received awards for her writing and teaching and has served on several government study commissions. She teaches family law, feminist jurisprudence, law and sexuality, and seminars on reproductive issues and select topics in feminist legal theory.

Prof. Martin Guggenheim, Fiorello LaGuardia Professor of Clinical Law, New York University School of Law

One of the nation’s foremost experts on children’s rights and family law, Martin Guggenheim has taught at NYU School of Law since 1973. He served as Director of Clinical and Advocacy Programs from 1988 to 2002 and also was the Executive Director of Washington Square Legal Services, Inc. from 1987 to 2000. For 15 years, he taught the Juvenile Rights Clinic in which students represented accused juvenile delinquents in New York’s Family Court. He then created the Family Defense Clinic, which represents parents and other adult relatives of children in foster care in New York City.

Guggenheim has been an active litigator in the area of children and the law and has argued leading cases on juvenile delinquency and termination of parental rights in the Supreme Court of the United States. Guggenheim is also a well-known scholar, having published more than 40 book chapters and articles in leading law reviews in the United States, including Columbia, Harvard, Michigan and NYU Law Reviews. His research has focused on adolescent abortion, First Amendment rights in schools, the role of counsel for children in court proceedings, empirical research in child welfare practice, juvenile justice and family law. He is the author of five books on children and parents. His most recent book, What’s Wrong with Children’s Rights was published by Harvard University Press in 2005.

Guggenheim is a 1971 graduate of NYU School of Law where he was an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Scholar. After law school, Guggenheim worked at the Juvenile Rights Division of New York City’s Legal Aid Society as a staff attorney and in its special litigation unit. He also was a staff attorney for four years in the Juvenile Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation.

Prof. Angela P. Harris, Professor of Law; Executive Committee Member, Center for Social Justice, Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley

Before joining the Boalt faculty in 1988, Angela Harris served as a law clerk to Judge Joel M. Flaum of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, and as an attorney in the San Francisco office of Morrison & Foerster. She was a visiting professor at Stanford Law School in 1991, Yale Law School in 1997 and Georgetown Law Center in 2000.

Harris's writing and research focus on feminist legal theory and critical race theory. Her recent publications include Gender and Law: Theory, Doctrine, Commentary (with Katherine Bartlett, 1998) and Race and Races: Cases and Resources for a Diverse America (with Juan Perea, Richard Delgado and Stephanie Wildman, 2000).

In 2003 Harris received the Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction, an annual award that honors a Boalt Hall professor who has demonstrated an outstanding commitment to teaching. She also received the 2003 Mathew O. Tobriner Public Service Award, an annual prize that recognizes Bay Area law school professors for their commitment to academic diversity and for mentoring the next generation of lawyers.

Prof. Barbara Bennett Woodhouse, David H. Levin Chair in Family Law; Director, Center on Children and Families; Co-Director, UF Institute for Child & Adolescent Research, Evaluation Univ. of Florida Levin College of Law

Barbara Bennett Woodhouse is the David H. Levin Chair in Family Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, the Director of the Center on Children and Families and Co-Director of the Institute for Child & Adolescent Research and Evaluation. An expert on children and the law, she clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and was Co-Director/Co-Founder of the Center for Children’s Policy, Practice and Research at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the University of Florida College of Law in 2001. She teaches in the areas of Adoption, Child Welfare Law, Children's Rights, Constitutional Law, Family Law, The Supreme Court and The Family, and Child/Parent and State.

Child Centered Jurisprudence and Feminist Jurisprudence: Exploring the Connections and the Tensions

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