Dorothy Roberts

Kirkland and Ellis Professor, Northwestern University Law School
Professor, Department of African-American Studies and Sociology
Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research
JD, Harvard Law School, 1980
d-roberts@law.northwestern.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Additional biographical information

Dorothy Roberts has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare. She is the author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997), which received a 1998 Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America, and Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002), which received research awards from the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community and the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children. She is also the co-author of casebooks on constitutional law and women and the law and has published more than 60 articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, and Social Text.

Roberts has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford, and a fellow at Harvard University's Program in Ethics and the Professions. She serves as a member of the board of directors of the Black Women’s Health Imperative and the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. She also serves on a panel of five national experts that is overseeing foster care reform in Washington State pursuant to a class action settlement agreement. In 2002-03, she was a Fulbright scholar at the Centre for Gender and Development Studies, University of the West Indies, Trinidad-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.

Current and Recent Research

Legal and Political Approaches to Race Consciousness in Biotechnology Research. This NSF-funded project uses legal theories of racial equality to analyze the relationship between the emergence of race-based biotechnology and political contests over race consciousness in social policy. Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of scientific interest in race-based genomic variation that has yielded biotechnology research and products that may reinscribe the biological nature of race. This project situates the emergence of race-based biotechnologies within the political struggle over colorblindness and race consciousness, linking debates about the validity and proper use of race as a category in science, law, and social policy. This project will contribute to biotechnology research and to public policy by helping scientists, policy makers, and the broader public better understand the social implications of race-based biotechnologies in the context of political and legal debates about racial equality. The ethical framework it proposes will provide practical guidance to researchers and policy makers charged with determining the proper role of race as a scientific category.

Race and Child Welfare Policy and Practice. Roberts has been studying the racial disparity in state removal of children from their homes, the impact of the child welfare system on black families, and how racial politics helps to shape child welfare policy. Using both statistical analysis and interviews, she focused on the effects of state intervention on family and community life, the impact of recently enacted adoption and welfare reform laws on parental rights, and the role of poverty and racial bias in determining child neglect. The study, which culminated in the book, Shattered Bonds, also proposed ways to improve the child welfare system and considers whether a goal of policy should be to reduce numbers in foster care through either family preservation policies or policies that make adoption easier. Roberts is continuing to research the impact of racial disparities in the child welfare system on black children, families and communities.

Interaction of Welfare Reform and Child Protective Services. Researchers estimate that about half of all cases referred to child protection services involve families on welfare. In Illinois alone, data from the state Department of Child and Family Services indicate that nearly two-thirds of the children placed in foster care had received welfare in the recent past. Roberts believes there is a clear need for more empirical work that examines the actual effect of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act on families involved with child protective services. Focusing on a subsample of 40 families from the Illinois Families Study, she investigated the impact of welfare reform measures on the actual experiences of welfare-recipient families involved in the state's child welfare system. Using both qualitative and quantitative data, she examined the impact of TANF rules on the timing and type of services received; the type of substitute care; the experience of families with conflicting requirements from welfare and child welfare caseworkers; and outcomes such as reunification of families and termination of parental rights.

Selected Publications

Books

Roberts, Dorothy. Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002)

Roberts, Dorothy, with Judith Greenberg and Martha Minow, eds. Frug's Women and the Law, 2nd ed.(Foundation Press, 1998).

Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. (Pantheon Books, 1997).

Roberts, Dorothy, with Donald E. Lively, Phoebe A. Haddon, and Russell L. Weaver. Constitutional Law: Cases, History and Dialogues (Anderson Publishing Company, 1996; 2nd ed., 2000).

Roberts, Dorothy, with Michael J. Glennon, Donald E. Lively, Phoebe A. Haddon, and Russell L. Weaver, eds. Constitutional Law Anthology (Anderson Publishing Company, 1996).

Roberts, Dorothy, with Donald E. Lively and Russell L. Weaver, eds. A First Amendment Anthology (Anderson Publishing Company, 1994).

Articles and Chapters

Roberts, D., and M. B. Ward Doran. 2002. Welfare reform and families in the child welfare system. University of Maryland Law Review 61:386-436.

Roberts, D. 2001. Kinship care and the price of state support for children. Symposium on the Structures of Care Work. Chicago-Kent Law Review 76(3): 1619-42.

Roberts, D. 1999. Mothers who fail to protect their children: Accounting for private and public responsibility. In Mother Troubles: Rethinking Contemporary Maternal Dilemmas, ed. J.E. Hanigsberg and S. Ruddick, 31-47. Boston: Beacon Press.

Roberts, D. 1999. Foreword: Race, vagueness, and the social meaning of order-maintenance policing, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 89(3): 775-836.

Roberts, D. 1999. Why culture matters to law: The difference politics makes. In Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law, ed. A. Sarat and T. R. Kearns, 85-110. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Roberts, D. 1998. The absent black father. In Lost Fathers: The Politics of Fatherlessness in America, 144-61. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Roberts, D. 1997. Spiritual and menial housework, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 9(1): 51-80.

Roberts, D. 1996. Reconstructing the patient: Starting with women of color. In Feminism and Bioethics: Beyond Reproduction, ed. S. M. Wolf, 116-43. New York: Oxford University Press.

Roberts, D. 1996. Who may give birth to citizens? Reproduction, eugenics, and immigration. In Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the U.S., ed. J. F. Perea, 205-19. New York: New York University Press.

Roberts, D. 1996. Race and the new reproduction, Hastings Law Journal 47(4): 935-50.

Roberts, D. 1996. Welfare and the problem of black citizenship, Yale Law Journal 105(6): 1563-1602.

Roberts, D. 1991. Punishing drug addicts who have babies: Women of color, equality, and the right of privacy. Harvard Law Review 104(7): 1419-82.