Dorothy E. Roberts (born 1956) is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, Illinois.[1]
Roberts received her Bachelor of Arts from Yale University and her Doctor of Jurisprudence from Harvard Law School. She is an author, lecturer, and lawyer. She has written extensively and lectured on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, motherhood, bioethics, and child welfare.
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Roberts has published more than fifty articles and essays in books, scholarly journals, newspapers, and magazines, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, Social Text, and The New York Times. She has written Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Civitas Books, 2002) and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997), in which she purports to give "a powerful and authoritative account of the on-going assault - both figurative and literal - waged by the American government and our society on the reproductive rights of Black women."[2] and was the co-author of casebooks on constitutional law and women and the law. Killing the Black Body received a 1998 Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America. Her influential article, "Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy" (Harvard Law Review, 1991), has been widely cited and is included in a number of anthologies. Her most recent book is Fatal Invention (The New Press, 2011), which argues that America is once again at the brink of a virulent outbreak of classifying population by race, proving that race has always been a mutable and socially defined political division supported by mainstream science.
She was also a blogger at blackprof.com.
Roberts has delivered several endowed lectures, including the James Thomas Lecture at Yale Law School. She was elected twice by the Rutgers University School of Law graduating class to be faculty graduation speaker, and was voted outstanding first-year course professor by the Northwestern University School of Law class of 2000. She received the Radcliffe University Graduate Society Medal in June, 1998. Her current projects concern race and child welfare policy.
Roberts has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University.
In 2002-03, she was a Fulbright Scholar at the Centre for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago, where she conducted research on family planning policy and on gender, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean. She is currently conducting research on the significance of the spatial concentration of state supervision of children in African American communities and on the use of race in biomedical research and biotechnology.
Roberts is featured in the documentary film, Silent Choices, about abortion and reproductive rights from the perspective of African Americans. Roberts also served as an advisor to the film.
Professor Roberts has drawn parallels between what she sees as current U.S. "imperialism" and white supremacy, asserting U.S. torture of terrorist suspects is a tool to maintain supremacy just as violence has been used to maintain white supremacy, and comparing the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison to racist lynchings of blacks.[3]