CATHARINE MACKINNON

Catharine A. MacKinnon was born on October 7, 1946 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father was a lawyer, congressman, and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. She is the third generation of her family to attend her mother's alma mater, Smith College. She obtained her J.D. from Yale University in 1977, and PhD from Yale in 1987. MacKinnon is a lawyer, teacher, writer, and activist on sex equality issues domestically and internationally. She is Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and from 2008-2012 was the first Special Gender Adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. She has been the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School since 2009. Widely published in many languages, her dozen books include Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979), Feminism Unmodified (1987), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989), Only Words (1993), Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws (2005), Are Women Human? (2006), her casebook Sex Equality (2016), and Butterfly Politics (2017). She conceived sexual abuse as a violation of equality rights, pioneering the legal claim for sexual harassment as sex discrimination in employment and education; with Andrea Dworkin, she recognized the harms of pornography as civil rights violations and proposed the Swedish Model to abolish prostitution. Representing Bosnian women survivors of Serbian genocidal sexual atrocities, MacKinnon, along with her co-counsel, won a damage award of $745 million in August 2000 in Kadic v. Karadzic under the Alien Tort Act, the first recognition of rape as an act of genocide. She works with ERA Coalition and the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW).

"How can you go through life knowing what really happens to women and do nothing about it?"