Linda C. McClain

Paul M. Siskind Research Scholar
Professor of Law
A.B., with High Honors in Religion, Oberlin College
M.A., University of Chicago Divinity School
J.D., cum laude, Georgetown University Law Center
LL.M., New York University School of Law

Interests: family law and policy; gender and law; feminist legal theory; civil society; political philosophy; property; reproductive issues; law and religion; welfare law; comparative law

Linda C. McClain is known for her work in family law and feminist legal theory.  Her recent book, The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility (Harvard University Press, 2006), offers a liberal and feminist perspective on the relationship between family life and the polity and on a number of contested issues of family law and policy, including governmental promotion of marriage, the denial of marriage to same-sex couples, welfare policy and constitutional rights to reproductive freedom. The Place of Families has been described as “the most careful and comprehensive defense to date of the progressive liberal feminist position on the civic role of families” and “a ‘must read’ for anyone interested in the future of American families and family law.”

Professor McClain’s 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. Her work 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. She has published numerous articles in law reviews and books and spoken in many academic and public settings. Professor McClain has also organized major conferences and symposia.

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. A former faculty fellow at the Harvard University Center for Ethics and the Professions, she has been a visiting professor of law at Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia. Professor McClain is on the executive committee of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Family Law and is a member of the Council on Contemporary Families. She is also on the advisory board of the Georgetown Journal of Gender and Law and the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project.

Professor McClain is currently working on several book projects, including Rights and Irresponsibility (with BU Law Professor James Fleming), Why Is Equality So Hard?: Men, Women, and Social Cooperation, The Place of Associations, an anthology on women’s citizenship (with Joanna Grossman), and an anthology (with Daniel Cere) on competing paradigms of parenthood.