Linda C. McClain

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 is a former Laurence S. Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton University’s University Center for Human Values and a former faculty fellow at the Harvard University Center for Ethics and the Professions (now the Safra Center). A member of the American Law Institute, she serves on the Executive Committee for the AALS Sections on Family and Juvenile Law and on Women in Legal Education. She is a member of the Council on Contemporary Families, the American Political Science Association, and the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. Professor McClain has been a visiting professor of law at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Virginia. 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. She enjoys playing classical piano.

McClain has organized interdisciplinary conferences at BU Law, published as symposia in Boston University Law Review, including: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 at 50: Past, Present, and Future, and Evaluating Claims about ‘the End of Men’: Legal and Other Perspectives. She frequently speaks to the press on issues concerning family law and marriage.