Linda C. McClain

Linda C. McClain is known for her work in family law, gender and law, and feminist legal theory. Her scholarship addresses the respective roles of families, other institutions of civil society and of government in fostering citizens’ capacities for democratic and personal self-government. She has engaged with prominent communitarian, civic republican and feminist critiques of liberal legal and political theory and offered a reconstructive liberal feminist approach to such matters as privacy, family and marriage, reproductive issues and welfare law. Her work also addresses sex equality as a legal and constitutional commitment and public value, the responsibility of government to promote equality, and societal tensions over equality and its relationship to other values. She was lead organizer of a 2012 BU Law conference, “Evaluating Claims about ‘the End of Men’: Legal and Other Perspectives.” Since Fall 2010, she has been a Faculty Fellow at the BU School of Theology, where she has pursued issues of pluralism, religion in the public square, and the role of religion in conflict and peacemaking. She contributes to the blog, Balkinization, and frequently speaks to the press on issues concerning family law and marriage.

Professor McClain serves on the Executive Committee of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Family and Juvenile Law. She is a member of the Council on Contemporary Families. She is also on the advisory board of the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project. A former faculty fellow at the Harvard University Center for Ethics and the Professions, Professor McClain has been a visiting professor of law at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Virginia. Before joining the faculty of Boston University School of Law in Fall 2007, Professor McClain was the Rivkin Radler Distinguished Professor of Law at Hofstra Law School, where she was also co-director of the Institute for the Study of Gender, Law, and Policy. Prior to entering the legal academy, she practiced litigation at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.