Martha Albertson Fineman


Martha Albertson Fineman is an American jurist, legal theorist and political philosopher. She is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. Fineman was previously the first holder of the Dorothea S. Clarke Professorship of Feminist Jurisprudence at Cornell Law School and held the Maurice T. Moore Professorship at Columbia Law School.
Fineman is one of the most influential figures in feminist legal theory and critical legal theory and directs the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, which she founded in 1984. Much of her early scholarship focuses on the legal regulation of family and intimacy, and she has been called "the preeminent feminist family theorist of our time." She has since broadened her scope to focus on the legal implications of universal dependency, vulnerability and justice. Her recent work formulates a theory of vulnerability, in order to argue for a more responsive state and a more egalitarian society. She is a prominent progressive liberal thinker; she has been an affiliated scholar of John Podesta's Center for American Progress and has been described as a "close friend of the Obama administration."

Career

Fineman has a B.A. from Temple University and a J.D. from the University of Chicago. After graduating from law school, she clerked for the Hon. Luther Merritt Swygert of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and was on faculty at the University of Wisconsin Law School from 1976 to 1990. Subsequently, Fineman moved to Columbia Law School, where she was appointed as the Maurice T. Moore Professor of Law in 1990. She went on to become the first Dorothea S. Clarke Professor of Feminist Jurisprudence at Cornell Law School in 1999; the professorship being the first endowed chair in feminist jurisprudence at a law school in the United States. Since 2004, she has been a Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law, which is the institution's highest honor bestowed on a faculty member. The honor is "reserved for world-class scholars who are not only proven leaders of their own fields of specialty, but also ambitious bridge-builders across specialty disciplines." She is the third legal scholar after Harold J. Berman and Michael J. Perry to be appointed to such a chair.
Fineman directs the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, which she founded in 1984 and which has been housed by the University of Wisconsin Law School, Columbia Law School, Cornell Law School, and Emory Law. The Feminism and Legal Theory Project nurtures scholars from around the world, bringing them together to study and debate a wide range of topics related to feminist theory and law. She also directs the Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative which was founded in 2008 at Emory Law School. Fineman is an affiliated scholar of the Center for American Progress.
In September 2018, she was ranked the #1 Most-Cited Family Law Faculty in the U.S. for the period 2013-2017 on Brian Leiter Law School Reports, based on Sisk Annual Report data.

Work on dependency and vulnerability

In her 2004 book The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency, Fineman "argues that popular ideology in the United States has become fixated on the myth that citizens are and should be autonomous. Yet the fact that dependency is unavoidable in any society and must be dealt with to sustain the polity, Fineman contends, gives the state the responsibility to support caretaking."
Her 2008 article "The Vulnerable Subject" in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism develops a theory of vulnerability in order to argue for a more responsive state and a more egalitarian society. The article forms the basis for her 2011 book, also titled The Vulnerable Subject.
Fineman argues:
Vulnerability is and should be understood to be universal and constant, inherent in the human condition. The vulnerability approach is an alternative to traditional equal protection analysis; it represents a post-identity inquiry in that it is not focused only on discrimination against defined groups, but concerned with privilege and favor conferred on limited segments of the population by the state and broader society through their institutions. As such, vulnerability analysis concentrates on the institutions and structures our society has and will establish to manage our common vulnerabilities. This approach has the potential to move us beyond the stifling confines of current discrimination-based models toward a more substantive vision of equality.

According to Selberg and Wegerstad,
Fundamental to Fineman's scholarly work is a feminist critique of notions of equality, the liberal subject and prevailing anti-discrimination politics. According to Fineman, the current anti-discrimination doctrine assumes that discrimination is the discoverable and correctable exception to an otherwise just and fair system, characterized by values such as individual liberty and autonomy. Developing her work on dependency, Fineman raises the question: if our bodily fragility, material needs, and the possibility of messy dependency they signify cannot be ignored in life, how can they be absent in our theories about equality, society, politics and law?' Moving beyond gender and other identity categories, Fineman uses the concept of vulnerability to 'define the very meaning of what it means to be human.'

Awards and recognitions

Fineman is the recipient of numerous scholarly awards, including the 2008 Cook Award from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, and the 2006–2007 Leverhulme Visiting Professorship, one of the United Kingdom's top academic honors. She is also the recipient of the prestigious Harry Kalven Prize, awarded by the Law and Society Association to a scholar whose body of "empirical scholarship has contributed most effectively to the advancement of research in law and society." In March 2004, a symposium of some 500 scholars and students gathered at Emory University School of Law to celebrate the scholarship of its three Robert W. Woodruff Professors of Law, Harold J. Berman, Martha Albertson Fineman, and Michael J. Perry, and Visiting Professor Martin E. Marty.
She was Pritzker Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Northwestern University School of Law in 1997, was Distinguished Associated Professor at the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs in 2003, has held an honorary Professorship at Queen's University Belfast since 2004, was awarded the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Thomas Jefferson Law School in 2005 and has held the Hedda Andersson Visiting Professorship at Lund University since 2012.
In 2013 Lund University awarded her an honorary doctorate. The Faculty of Law named Fineman and former Swedish Chief Justice Johan Munck as its new honorary doctors in 2013.
In 2016 Fineman was awarded the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award by the Association of American Law Schools.
In 2018, she was awarded Albany Law School's Miriam M. Netter '72 Stoneman Award in recognition of her efforts to expand opportunities for women.

Publications

Fineman has published widely. She has been listed in the top ten most cited scholars in multiple areas of legal scholarship, including critical legal theory and family law. Her books are
Fineman has also edited or co-edited the following critical legal theory volumes:
At the Boundaries of Law is the first volume of feminist legal theory.
She has published numerous journal articles and essays. Her most widely cited articles include:
Fineman has also authored publications outside of law journals:
Publications written about Martha Fineman and her work include:
In 2018, Emory Law Journal featured six articles about Fineman in its 6th issue, written by esteemed colleagues and scholars, some of whom are fellow Law Professors at Emory Law School: