Dorothy Roberts, JD

Dorothy Roberts, JD, is an internationally recognized legal scholar and social justice advocate. She has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues, and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. On July 1, 2012, Roberts will join the University of Pennsylvania as the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology. Her appointment will be shared between the School of Law, where she will also be the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, and the Department of Sociology in the School of Arts and Sciences. She is currently the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Northwestern University School of Law, with joint appointments in the departments of African American Studies and Sociology (by courtesy), and a faculty fellow of the Institute for Policy Research. She is the author of the award-winning books Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Random House/Pantheon, 1997) and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books/Civitas, 2002), as well as co-editor of six books on constitutional law and gender. She has also published more than 80 articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review. Her latest book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, was published by the New Press in July 2011.