Biography
Catharine A. MacKinnon, the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law and long-term James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, 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. Representing Bosnian women survivors of Serbian genocidal sexual atrocities, Professor MacKinnon 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. The Supreme Court of Canada largely accepted her approaches to equality, pornography, and hate speech. In addition to scholarly works that 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 has published widely in journals and the popular press. Her work has been documented to be among the most widely-cited writings on law in the English language. Professor 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, and Columbia, among others, and spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study at Stanford. Professor MacKinnon practices and consults nationally and internationally, and works with Equality Now, an non-governmental organization promoting international sex equality rights for women, and the Coalition for Trafficking in Women (CATW). She was recently appointed Special Gender Adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.