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W&L’s Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar to Lecture on the Future of Gender

Catharine A. MacKinnon, the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar at Washington and Lee University and the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, will give a lecture on Thursday, Oct. 1, at 6 p.m. in Lee Chapel at W&L.

The title of the talk, which is free and open to the public, is “Gender: The Future.”

One of the most widely cited legal scholars in English, MacKinnon specializes in sex-equality issues under international and constitutional law. She pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment and, with Andrea Dworkin, created ordinances recognizing pornography as a civil rights violation. The Supreme Court of Canada largely accepted her approaches to equality, pornography and hate speech.

MacKinnon’s scholarly books include Sex Equality (2001), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), Only Words (1993), Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws (2005) and Are Women Human? (2006). She is published in journals, the popular press and many languages.

Representing Bosnian women survivors of Serbian genocidal sexual atrocities, she won with co-counsel a damage award of $745 million in August 2000 in Kadic v. Karadzic, which first recognized rape as an act of genocide. She works with Equality Now, an NGO (non-governmental organization) promoting international sex equality rights for women.

MacKinnon holds a B.A. from Smith College, a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale. She has taught at Yale, Chicago, Harvard, Osgoode Hall, Stanford, Basel (Switzerland) and Columbia, spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study, and practices and consults nationally and internationally.