Catharine MacKinnon: "Women's September 11th: Rethinking the International Law of Conflict"

In the first of two talks at the law school, "Women's September 11th," groundbreaking feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon will compare the "war on terror" with the non-war on violence against women under international law. On Friday, she'll read from, and sign copies of her new book, "Women's Lives, Men's Laws." (See booksigning event on April 15, 2005.)

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 expert in sex equality under constitutional and international law. 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).

MacKinnon's books include: "Sex Equality," "Toward a Feminist Theory of the State," "Only Words," "Sexual Harassment of Working Women," "Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law," "In Harm's Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings" (co-edited with Andrea Dworkin), and the recently published "Women's Lives, Men's Laws."

In representing Bosnian Muslim and Croat women survivors of Serbian genocidal sexual atrocities, Catharine MacKinnon established rape as an act of genocide under law, an approach that is influencing international tribunals, and with co-counsel 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.