Emory University Law Professor Martha Albertson Fineman will be honored with the 2022 Outstanding Scholar Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation (ABF). Professor Fineman is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at the Emory University School of Law and is an internationally recognized law and society scholar. Fineman will receive the award during the 66th Annual Fellows Awards Banquet, an event that will be held on February 15, 2022. Awarded annually since 1957, the Outstanding Scholar Award is given to an individual who has engaged in outstanding scholarship in law or government. This year, the ABF will recognize Professor Fineman for her cutting-edge research on legal regulation of intimacy, feminist legal theory, jurisprudence and vulnerability theory, and the ways law shapes expectations, policies and practices related to gender.
“Martha’s career and scholarship are exemplary and are consistent with the ABF’s mission to expand knowledge and advance justice through rigorous, interdisciplinary research,” said Cynthia E. Nance, Chair of the Fellows and a current Patron Fellow. “The ABF Fellows are honored to recognize her important work and exceptional career with this year’s Outstanding Scholar Award.”
“I am truly honored to be recognized by the ABF in this way,” Professor Fineman said. “The ABF is a renowned empirical research institution, and to have such an organization that is a leader in social science research acknowledge my work is a great privilege.”
A Life Fellow of the ABF and an internationally recognized law and society scholar, Professor Fineman is a leading authority on critical legal theory and feminist legal philosophy. At Emory University, Fineman serves as the founding director of the Feminism and Legal Theory (FLT) Project, which was inaugurated in 1984 at the University of Wisconsin. The FLT Project published the first anthology of feminist legal theory and has published over a dozen other collections of feminist legal theory edited by Fineman. She is also the founding director of the Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative (VHC) which emerged from the Feminism and Legal Theory Project in 2008 and comprises the bulk of Fineman’s current research and writing.
Fineman has won numerous awards for her writing and teaching, including the prestigious Harry J Kalven, Jr. Prize for Distinguished Research in Law and Society and the Ruth Bader Ginsberg Lifetime Achievement Award. She also was awarded the Degree of Doctor Honoris Causa, Faculty of Law, Lund University, Sweden.
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About the American Bar Foundation
The American Bar Foundation (ABF) is the world’s leading research institute for the empirical and interdisciplinary study of law. The ABF seeks to expand knowledge and advance justice through innovative, interdisciplinary, and rigorous empirical research on law, legal processes, and legal institutions. To further this mission the ABF will produce timely, cutting-edge research of the highest quality to inform and guide the legal profession, the academy, and society in the United States and internationally. The ABF’s primary funding is provided by the American Bar Endowment and the Fellows of The American Bar Foundation.