University Distinguished Lecture

Biography

Professor Martha Chamallas
Robert J. Lynn Chair in Law
Moritz College of Law

Martha Chamallas has held the Robert J. Lynn Chair in Law at the Michael E. Moritz College of Law since 2002. She began her academic career at Louisiana State University, her alma mater, where she graduated first in her law school class and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Louisiana Law Review. In her thirty years of law teaching, Professor Chamallas has held several distinguished visiting positions in the United States and has been a lecturer in comparative torts at the University of Ghent in Belgium. She has also been on the law faculties of the University of Pittsburgh, L.S.U., and the University of Iowa, where she served as the Chair of the Women’s Studies Program.

Professor Chamallas specializes in tort law, feminist legal theory and the law of employment discrimination. She is best known for her writings on gender and race bias in diverse contexts, from rape and sexual harassment law, to inequities in the computation of damages in personal injury actions. Her leading treatise, Introduction to Feminist Legal Theory (Aspen 2003), now in its second edition, was the first to examine the evolution of feminist theory in the law. She has published in top law journals, including the Vanderbilt, Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, UCLA and Southern California law reviews.

Professor Chamallas’s scholarship has had real-world impact, directly influencing the recommendations of state taskforces on gender and race bias in the courts and the method used by the Special Master of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund for calculating awards for the families of female victims of the attacks.  She was one of the drafters of the AAUP Statement of Principles on Family and Academic Work (2001). With co-author, Jennifer Wriggins, she is currently writing a book, The Measure of Injury: Race, Gender and the Law of Torts, to be published by New York University Press in 2008.

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