Working Families: Gender, Labor, and the Limits of Law in Neoliberal America with Deborah Dinner, J.D., Ph.D

The Rutgers Center for Gender, Sexuality, Law and Policy, in partnership with the Eric Neisser Public Interest Program, welcomes Deborah Dinner Associate Professor, Emory University Law School, for a lunchtime lecture, “Working Families: Gender, Labor, and the Limits of Law in Neoliberal America” on Tuesday October 17th.

This event is free and open to the public but registration is required. Please register here by Thursday, October 12th.

Deborah Dinner is a legal historian whose scholarship examines the interaction between social movements, political culture, and legal change. Dinner’s research focuses on how law responds to vulnerabilities that derive from familial and employment relationships, at home and at work.

Dinner is currently writing a book tentatively titled Contested Labor: Social Reproduction, Work, and Law in the Neoliberal Age forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Contested Labor examines debates about the meaning of sex equality in the late twentieth century. The book argues that neoliberal ideology, the rise of the New Right, and the transition from an industrial to a service economy foreclosed feminists’ efforts to achieve greater state protection for workers and caregivers, even as women made significant strides toward equal employment opportunity. Dinner has written several articles on childcare activism, feminism and social welfare, pregnancy discrimination, neoliberal employment law, and the legal history of fathers’ rights, published in the Virginia Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, Washington University Law Review, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, and Law & History Review.

Dinner joined Emory in 2015, after serving as an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. Dinner earned her JD and PhD in history at Yale. Following law school, she clerked for Judge Karen Nelson Moore of the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and served as the Raoul Berger–Mark DeWolfe Howe Legal History Fellow at Harvard University and the Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University School of Law.