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Objection! Gender, Sex, Law, and Social Change

 2012 Symposium Keynote Speakers

 

Pamela D. Bridgewater, professor of law, American University Washington College of Law

Pamela Bridgewater is a lawyer, reproductive rights advocate, and activist. She has been involved in the women’s health movement for many years, providing legal defense of reproductive health care clinics, service providers, and activists. Prior to teaching law, Bridgewater worked as a legal aid lawyer specializing in advance directives for people living with HIV/AIDS.  Her work in the area of reproduction, sexuality, identity, poverty, and women’s health care has led her to work with leading legal scholars, policymakers, activists, and advocates from North America, Europe, Latin America, and South Africa. Her current projects include editing a reproductive justice anthology in collaboration with SisterSong: A Reproductive Justice Collaborative and co-chairing the Society of American Law Teachers’ Access to Justice Committee.  She is the author of numerous articles and a book manuscript, Breeding a Nation: Reproductive Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom, and she is a blogger at hiphoplaw.com.

 

Linda C. McClain, Professor of Law and Paul M. Siskind Research Scholar, Boston University School of Law

Linda McClain is nationally known for her work in family law, gender and law, and feminist legal theory.  Her influential scholarship examines the relationship between families, other institutions of civil society, and government.  She is the author of The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility (Harvard, 2006), which develops a liberal feminist account of the relationship between families and the political order and applies it to a number of contested matters of family law and policy.  In addition to publishing numerous law review articles and book chapters, she is co-editor of Gender Equality: Dimensions of Women’s Equal Citizenship (Cambridge, 2009) and the forthcoming collection What Is Parenthood?: Contemporary Debates about the Family, and co-author of the forthcoming book Ordered Liberty: Rights, Responsibilities, and Virtues in a Constitutional Democracy.  Prior to joining the BU faculty, Professor McClain was the Rivkin Radler Distinguished Professor of Law at Hofstra University School of Law.  Before teaching law, she was a litigation associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City.

 

Andrea Ritchie is a police misconduct attorney and organizer who has engaged in extensive research, writing, speaking, litigation, organizing, and advocacy on profiling, policing, and physical and sexual violence by law enforcement agents against women, girls, and LGBT people of color in the US and Canada over the past two decades.  She currently coordinates Streetwise & Safe (SAS), a leadership development initiative aimed at sharing information, strategies for safety, and visions for change among LGBT youth of color.  Her book, Violence Every Day: Racial Profiling and Police Brutality Against Women, Girls and Transgender People of Color, will be published in 2012 by South End Press. Ritchie is also co-author of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Beacon Press 2011).

 

Rafia Zakaria, attorney, writer, and human rights activist

Rafia Zakaria is an author and activist focusing on Muslim women and minority rights.  A director for Amnesty International USA, she is also co-founder of the Muslim Women’s Legal Fund, which represents victims of domestic violence in family and immigration law cases.  Zakaria teaches constitutional law, political theory, and the politics of Islam at Indiana University, where she is completing a PhD in political philosophy and writing a dissertation about Muslim women, multiculturalism, and sharia law.  Zakaria is the author of the forthcoming Silence in Karachi: An Intimate History of Pakistan (Beacon), which focuses on transformations in private relationships during times of political tumult.  She is also a blogger for Ms. and writes a weekly column for DAWN, which is Pakistan’s largest and oldest English newspaper, and her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Dissent, and American Prospect.