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Biography of Keynote
Speaker
Catharine A.
MacKinnon, Elizabeth A. Long
Professor of Law at the University of
Michigan and recently long-term visitor at the University of Chicago Law School,
is a teacher, lawyer, writer, and activist on sex equality under
constitutional and international law. Her J.D. and her Ph.D. in
political science are from Yale.
She pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment as sex discrimination
and, with Andrea Dworkin, the recognition of the harms of pornography as civil
rights violations. The Supreme Court of Canada has largely adopted her equality
analysis, as well as the approach to hate speech and pornography as equality
violations that she and Andrea Dworkin created. Her eleven books include Sex
Equality (2001), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989),
Only Words (1993), Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979), In
Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings, co-edited with Andrea
Dworkin, and the just published Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws (2005).
In representing Bosnian Muslim and Croat women survivors of Serbian
genocidal sexual atrocities, she established rape as an act of genocide under
law, an approach that is influencing international tribunals, and won a $745
million verdict at trial. She co-directs The Lawyers Alliance for Women (LAW)
Project of Equality Now, an international NGO promoting sex equality around the
world. Professor MacKinnon is one of the most widely-cited legal scholars in the
English language. She has been fighting for women’s human rights against
pornography for a quarter of a century.
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