Katharine B. Silbaugh

Law Alumni Scholar
Professor of Law
B.A. magna cum laude, Amherst College
J.D. with high honors and Order of the Coif, University of Chicago Law School

Interests: work-family conflict; family law; employment law; domestic labor; women and the law

Katharine Silbaugh is widely recognized for her pioneering work on the legal response to women’s domestic labor. She is a leader in the emerging legal literature on the stresses of the work-family conflict. Her research highlights the economic and social value of work done within households, and the inadequacy of the legal response to that labor. Her work on the causes and possible solutions to tensions between paid work hours and family life break new ground.

Professor Silbaugh clerked for Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She later collaborated with Posner on a survey of sexual regulation, A Guide to America’s Sex Laws, published by the University of Chicago Press and now in paperback. She also is the author of numerous journal articles including the “Commodification and Women’s Household Labor” for Yale Journal of Law and Feminism and “Turning Labor into Love: Housework and the Law” for Northwestern Law Review. She was the editor of The Structures of Carework published by the Chicago-Kent Law Review in 2001. Professor Silbaugh contributed to the plaintiffs case in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the landmark Massachusetts case leading to the first court-approved same-sex marriages in 2004.

Professor Silbaugh joined the Boston University faculty in 1993, and received tenure and a full professorship in 1998. She served as the associate dean for academic affairs from 2004 until 2006. She spent the 2006-2007 academic year as a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. She teaches Family Law, Employment Discrimination, Women, Work, and Families, Women and the Law and Torts. Professor Silbaugh was the recipient in 2004 of the Michael Melton Award for Excellence in Teaching.