Boston University School of Law
The Routledge Companion to Gender and COVID-19
Celebrate the publication of this volume in a panel discussion with its editors, BU Law faculty Linda C. McClain and Aziza Ahmed, and leading voices on public health, human rights, and reproductive rights and justice. The panel includes two contributors to the volume, Professor Jacqueline Dugard and Professor Maya Manian , and commentator Professor Matiangai Sirleaf . This conversation will be moderated by Associate Dean for Intellectual Life, Jessica Silbey .
Learn more about the book here .
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Matiangai Sirleaf
Nathan Patz Professor of Law, University of Maryland
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Professor Matiangai Sirleaf is an interdisciplinary international scholar, justice seeker, and human rights advocate who has worked to unearth unjust hierarchies embedded in international law and to remedy the inequities that emerge and persist.
She is the Nathan Patz Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. She holds a secondary appointment as a professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Professor Sirleaf has published widely and extensively. Her areas of expertise include public international law, international human rights law, global public health law, international criminal law, post-conflict and transitional justice, and criminal law. Her current research projects are focused on race and the histories of international human rights and health inequality and the law.
Maya Manian
Professor of Law, American University
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Maya Manian is a Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Health Law and Policy Program at American University Washington College of Law. She was previously a Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco School of Law, and has been a Visiting Professor at Howard University School of Law and University of California Berkeley School of Law. She teaches courses on constitutional law, public health law, and reproductive health care, and has also taught family law and contracts courses.
Professor Manian is a nationally recognized expert on reproductive rights and justice. Her scholarship investigates the relationship between constitutional law, family law, and health care law, with a particular focus on access to reproductive health care. She publishes and presents widely on abortion rights, and has authored numerous law journal articles and book chapters on the subject. Her current work uses sociological methods to understand how legal restrictions on abortion care might constrain a wide range of women and pregnant people’s medical care.
Professor Manian earned her juris doctorate magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and her bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan. She is currently a PhD candidate in medical sociology at the University of California San Francisco. Prior to entering the academy, Professor Manian worked as a litigation fellow at the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York.
Jacqueline C.A. Dugard
Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Human Rights in Political Science, Columbia
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Jacqueline Dugard is a Senior Lecturer in the discipline of Human Rights and Political Science at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Political Science, Columbia University. She is currently part of a multi-country Research Council of Norway-funded project, “
Pluriland ”, which seeks to understand the impact on human security of enacting plural land rights in constitutions and law. Dr. Dugard is the leader of the workstream on Land and Housing for the UN-funded project, “Making Prevention a Reality: A Framework Approach”. Together with a colleague from the University of the Witwatersrand, Joel Quirk, Dr. Dugard is editing a forthcoming special issue of the
South African Journal on Human Rights (SAJHR) on Gender-Based Violence at universities.
Linda C. McClain
Robert Kent Professor of Law, Boston University
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Linda C. McClain is known for her work in family law, gender and law, and feminist legal theory. Her most recent book, Who’s the Bigot? Learning from Conflicts over Marriage and Civil Rights Law (Oxford University Press, 2020), argues that, although denouncing and preventing bigotry is a shared political value with a long history, people disagree over who is a bigot and what makes a belief, attitude, or action bigoted. This is evident from the rejoinder that calling out bigotry is intolerant political correctness, even bigotry itself. The book addresses puzzles about bigotry by tracing the rhetoric of bigotry and conscience across a range of debates relating to marriage and antidiscrimination law. In the words of one reviewer, “this is required reading for anyone who wants to understand our polarized society and how we got here.” Professor McClain is the author of several other books (described below) and numerous scholarly articles and book chapters. Her 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. She 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. Her work also addresses sex equality as a legal and constitutional commitment and public value, the responsibility of government to promote equality, and societal tensions over equality and its relationship to other values. Professor McClain has also written and spoken about law and literature, focusing on themes of household and political governance, marriage, and singleness in 19th century fiction.
Aziza Ahmed
Professor of Law, Boston University
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Aziza Ahmed ’s scholarship examines the intersection of law, politics, and science in the fields of constitutional law, criminal law, health law, and family law.
Before joining Boston University School of Law, Ahmed was professor of law at University of California, Irvine School of Law. She also taught at Northeastern University School of Law. She has served as visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School, Bennett Boskey Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, visiting scholar at the Harvard Law School Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, and Law and Public Affairs fellow at Princeton University.
Professor Ahmed’s scholarship has appeared in journals including University of Miami Law Review , American Journal of Law and Medicine , Harvard Journal of Law and Gender , Boston University Law Review , and American Journal of International Law .
Ahmed is the author of the forthcoming book Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS , published by Cambridge University Press, and coeditor of the forthcoming handbook, Race, Racism, and the Law , published by Edward Elgar Publishing with Guy-Uriel Charles. She has recently published a co-edited volume The Routledge Companion on Gender and COVID-19 with Linda McClain.
Jessica Silbey
Associate Dean for Intellectual Life, Boston University School of Law
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Jessica Silbey teaches and writes in the areas of intellectual property, constitutional law, and law and the humanities.
In addition to a law degree, she has a PhD in comparative literature and draws on her studies of literature and film to better account for law’s force, both its effectiveness and failing as socio-political regulation. In 2018, she was a
Guggenheim Fellow and has recently completed a book supported by that fellowship called
Against Progress: Intellectual Property and Fundamental Values in the Internet Age (Stanford University Press, 2022). In
Against Progress , Professor Silbey considers intellectual property debates in law and culture as a bellwether of changing social justice needs in the 21st century. The book argues that intellectual property law is becoming a central framework through which to discuss essential socio-political issues, extending ancient debates over our most cherished constitutional values, refiguring the substance of “progress” in terms that demonstrate the urgency of art and science to social justice today.
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