Catharine A. MacKinnon facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Catharine A. MacKinnon
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MacKinnon at the Brattle Theatre, Cambridge, 2006
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Catharine Alice MacKinnon
October 7, 1946 Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.
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| Education | Smith College (BA) Yale University (MSL, JD, PhD) |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | University of Michigan (Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law, 1989–) York University (Professor of Law, 1988–1989) various universities (Visiting Professor, 1984–1988) University of Minnesota (Assistant Professor of Law, 1982–1984) |
| Influences | Andrea Dworkin, August Bebel, György Lukács, Karl Marx, Simone de Beauvoir |
| Influenced | Andrea Dworkin, Martha Nussbaum |
Catharine Alice MacKinnon (born October 7, 1946) is an American feminist legal scholar, activist, and author. She is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, where she has been tenured since 1990, and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. From 2008 to 2012, she was the special gender adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
As an expert on international law, constitutional law, political and legal theory, and jurisprudence, MacKinnon focuses on women's rights andand exploitation.
MacKinnon is the author of over a dozen books, including Feminism Unmodified (1987), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989); Only Words (1993); a casebook, Sex Equality (2001 and 2007); Women's Lives, Men's Laws (2005); and Butterfly Politics (2017).
Contents
Early life and education
MacKinnon was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the first of three children (a girl and two boys) to Elizabeth Valentine Davis and George E. MacKinnon; her father was a lawyer, congressman (1947–1949), and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1969–1995).
She is the third generation of her family to attend her mother's alma mater, Smith College. She earned her MSL and then a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1977 and a PhD in political science, also from Yale University, in 1987. While at Yale, she received a National Science Foundation fellowship.
Career overview
MacKinnon is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. In 2007, she served as the Roscoe Pound Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and has also visited at NYU, University of Western Australia, University of San Diego, Hebrew University, Columbia Law School, University of Chicago, University of Basel, Yale Law School, Osgoode Hall Law School, UCLA School of Law, and Stanford Law School.
MacKinnon is an often-cited legal scholar and regular public speaker. She has also written extensively on social and political theory and methodology.
Research and legal work
Transgender sex equality
In a 2015 interview, MacKinnon cited Simone de Beauvoir's famous quotation about "becom[ing] a woman" to say that "[a]nybody who identifies as a woman, wants to be a woman, is going around being a woman, as far as I'm concerned, is a woman." Furthermore, during a lecture at Oxford University in 2022, MacKinnon continued to express her support for transfeminism and transgender sex equality, and criticized the postmodernism, liberalist anti-stereotyping approach, and anti-trans feminism. Her lecture was subsequently edited and published in the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism in 2023.
International work
In February 1992, the Supreme Court of Canada largely accepted MacKinnon's theories of equality.
MacKinnon represented Bosnian and Croatian women against Serbs accused of genocide since 1992. She was co-counsel, representing named plaintiff S. Kadic, in Kadic v. Karadzic and won a jury verdict of $745 million in New York City on August 10, 2000. In 2001, MacKinnon was named co-director of the Lawyers Alliance for Women (LAW) Project, an initiative of Equality Now, an international non-governmental organization.
MacKinnon works actively with the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and Apne Aap in India.
Political theory
MacKinnon argues that the inequality between women and men in most societies forms a hierarchy that institutionalizes male dominance, subordinating women, in an arrangement rationalised and often perceived as natural. She writes about the interrelations between theory and practice, recognizing that women's experiences have, for the most part, been ignored in both arenas. Furthermore, she uses Marxism to critique certain points in liberal feminism in feminist theory and uses radical feminism to criticize Marxist theory. MacKinnon notes Marx's criticism of theory that treated class division as a spontaneous event that occurred naturally. She understands epistemology as theories of knowing, and politics as theories of power: "Having power means, among other things, that when someone says, 'this is how it is,' it is taken as being that way. ...Powerlessness means that when you say 'this is how it is,' it is not taken as being that way. This makes articulating silence, perceiving the presence of absence, believing those who have been socially stripped of credibility, critically contextualizing what passes for simple fact, necessary to the epistemology of a politics of the powerless."
In 1996, Fred R. Shapiro calculated that "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence", 8 Signs 635 (1983), was the 96th most cited article in law reviews even though it was published in a non-legal journal.
Personal life
In the early 1990s, MacKinnon had a relationship with author and animal-rights activist Jeffrey Masson, and they were engaged to be married. Earlier, she had been married and divorced. MacKinnon has long been highly protective of details about her private life.
Honors
- Smith Medal, Smith College (1991)
- Doctor of Laws (LL.D., hon.), Haverford College (1991)
- Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal, Yale Graduate School Alumni Association (1995)
- Symposium, Yale Law School, honoring the 20th anniversary of the publication of ... Harassment of Working Women (1998)
- Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) (elected) (2005)
- Outstanding Scholar Award, Research Fellows of the American Bar Foundation (2007)
- Pioneer of Justice Award, Pace Law School (New York) (2008)
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award, American Association of Law Schools (AALS), Women's Section (2014)
- Alice Paul Award, National Organization of Men Against Sexism (NOMAS) for "Lifetime Dedication and Outstanding Achievement in Confronting Men's Violence Against Women" (2017)
- Award of Merit, Yale Law School Association, to "an esteemed graduate of Yale Law School ... recognized for having made a substantial contribution to public service or to the legal profession" (2022)
Selected works
Books
- (2001). Sex Equality. University Casebook Series. New York: Foundation Press.
- (2005). Legal Feminism in Theory and Practice. Resling.
- (2007). Sex Equality (2nd edition). University Casebook Series. New York: Foundation Press.
- (2015). Sex Equality Controversies: The Formosa Lectures. Taipei: National Taiwan University Press.
- (2016). Sex Equality (3rd edition). University Casebook Series. St. Paul, MN: Foundation Press.
- (2017). Butterfly Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- (2018). Gender in Constitutional Law. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
- (2022). Women's Lives in Men's Courts: Briefs for Change. Northport, NY: Twelve Tables Press (forthcoming).
See also
In Spanish: Catharine MacKinnon para niños
