Martha Fineman to Deliver Annual Tucker Lecture at W&L Law An internationally recognized law and society scholar, Fineman is a leading authority on critical legal theory and feminist jurisprudence.

By Law Communications
March 23, 2023

Martha Fineman, Robert W. Woodruff Professor at Emory University School of Law, will deliver this year’s Tucker Lecture at Washington and Lee University School of Law on Monday, April 3 at 5:00 p.m. in the Millhiser Moot Court Room, Sydney Lewis Hall.

The title of Prof. Fineman’s talk is “Vulnerability Theory.” She will appear via Zoom for an in-person audience. A webinar of the talk will also be available. Register here.

An internationally recognized law and society scholar, Fineman is a leading authority on critical legal theory and feminist jurisprudence. At Emory, Fineman continues to serve as the founding director of the Feminism and Legal Theory (FLT) Project, which was inaugurated in 1984. The FLT Project published the first anthology of feminist legal theory, At the Boundaries of Law: Feminism and Legal Theory Routledge Press, (1990), which was followed in 2010 with a 25th anniversary edition: Transcending the Boundaries of Law: Generations of Feminism and Legal Theory. The Project has published over a dozen other collections of feminist legal theory edited by Fineman including 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.

The Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative (VHC) emerged from the Feminism and Legal Theory Project in 2008 and comprises the bulk of Fineman’s current research and writing. Fineman serves as founding director of the VHC and organizes several local and international academic workshops each year. Vulnerability theory offers an alternative paradigm to a human rights approach to state responsibility and social justice. The workshops and visiting scholar opportunities at VHC allow scholars to engage in the concepts of “vulnerability” and “resilience” in conceiving of an ideally “responsive state.” Fineman’s recent vulnerability theory publications include a chapter titled “Injury in the Unresponsive State: Writing the Vulnerable Subject into Neo-Liberal Legal Culture” in Injury and Injustice: The Cultural Politics of Harm and Redress (Cambridge 2018) and “Vulnerability and Social Justice” 53 Valparaiso University L Rev. 341 (2019). Edited collections on vulnerability theory include Vulnerability and the Legal Organization of Work (Routledge 2017) and Vulnerability: Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for Law and Politics (Ashgate 2013).

The Tucker Lecture at Washington and Lee School of Law was first established by the W&L Board of Trustees in 1949 to mark the bicentennial of the University and the centennial of the Law School. It was named after John Randolph Tucker, hired in 1870 as the second faculty member in the Law School and named the first dean of the Washington and Law University School of Law in 1893.