Dorothy Roberts is an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law. In 2012, she left Northwestern Law School and joined the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and the Law School where she also holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mosell Alexander chair.
Her path breaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent issues in health, social justice, and bioethics, especially as they impact the lives of women, children and African-Americans.
Professor Roberts is the author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Random House/Pantheon, 1997) which examines the impact of legislation, social policy, and welfare “reform” on black women’s–especially poor black women’s–control over their bodies’ autonomy and their freedom to bear and raise children with respect and dignity in a society whose white mainstream is determined to demonize, even criminalize their lives. The book earned her a 1998 Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America
In 2001, she published her second book, Shattered Bonds: The Color Of Child Welfare, which received research awards from the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community and the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children. She is also the co-editor of six books on constitutional law and gender and the co-editor of Sex, Power and Taboo: Gender and HIV in the Caribbean and Beyond.
Professor Roberts buy viagra on amazon has published more than eighty articles and essays in books and scholarly journals. Her influential article, “Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy” (Harvard Law Review, 1991), has been widely cited and is included in a number of anthologies.
Her latest book, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, (New Press, 2011) examines how the myth of biological concept of race—revived by purportedly cutting-edge science, race-specific drugs, genetic testing, and DNA databases—continues to undermine a just society and promote inequality in a supposedly “post-racial” era.
She serves on the board of directors of the Black Women’s Health Imperative, the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, and Generations Ahead, as well as on the executive committee of Cells to Society: The Center on Social Disparities and Health. She also serves on a panel of five national experts that is overseeing foster care reform in Washington State and on the Standards Working Group of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
Professor Roberts graduated from Yale College, magna cum laude, where she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Three years later, in 1980, Roberts graduated from Harvard Law School with her J.D., and for the next year she served as a law clerk for Hon. Constance Baker Motley in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.