Dorothy Roberts

Dorothy E. Roberts (born March 8, 1956) is an American sociologist, law professor, and social justice advocate. She is the Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, George A. Weiss University Professor, and inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes and lectures on gender, race, and class in legal issues. Her focuses include reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. She has published over 80 articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review. She is a 2024 recipient of the MacArthur "Genius Grant".

Background

Roberts was born in 1956 in Chicago, Illinois, to a white father, Robert Roberts, and Jamaican-born black mother, Iris, who raised her in a politically active household in Hyde Park. Her father was an anthropologist, and her mother was his research assistant. The two researched interracial marriages, and conducted hundreds of interviews of interracial couples. Roberts' parents met at the University of Chicago, where her father was her mother's professor in her PhD program. (She left without finishing her degree to care for their children).

Roberts received her Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, from Yale University in 1977, where she was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She then attended Harvard Law School, receiving her Juris Doctor in 1980. Roberts met her former husband, Coltrane Chimurenga (born Randolph Simms) when they were both students at Harvard. They had two sons, Amilcar and Camillo, before Chimurenga died in 2019. Following law school, she clerked for Judge Constance Baker Motley in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Professional career

Lecturer and professor

From 1988 to 1994, Roberts was an associate professor of law at Rutgers University School of Law-Newark, and from 1994 to 1998, she was a professor of law and was elected twice to serve as the faculty graduation speaker in both 1992 and 1996.

She was also a visiting associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1994, and a fellow at the Harvard University Program in Ethics and the Professions from 1994 to 1995, as well as a visiting professor at the Northwestern University School of Law in 1997.

In 1998, she joined the faculty of Northwestern University School of Law with a joint appointment as a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. She was voted outstanding first-year course professor by the class of 2000 then being named the Kirkland & Ellis Professor in 2002.

While faculty at Northwestern, Roberts was visiting professor at Stanford Law School in 1998 as a Fulbright Fellow at the Centre for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies where she travel to Trinidad & Tobago from 2002 to 2003 to conduct research.

She also was appointed the Bacon-Kilkenny Distinguished Visiting professor at the Fordham University School of Law in 2006.

In 2019, Roberts gave the Betsy Wood Knapp '64 Lecture at Wellesley College. Her topic for this lecture was "The Problem with Race-Based Medicine." In the lecture, Roberts asserts that race, in medicine, is used as a proxy for the more complex aspects of health and disease that should require further investigation. Roberts notes that this topic is especially relevant in the age of genomic science where the desire is to reduce all aspects of disease and infection to a genetic origin. According to Roberts, this is an inaccurate assumption and can powerfully impact the medical treatment of women, children, and African-Americans.

Roberts later joined as faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where she remains a professor at the law school and sociology department and is the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science & Society. Her scholarship focuses on race, gender, bioethics, and the intersection of law and social justice, particularly concerning reproductive rights, child welfare, and systemic inequalities in health care.

Author

Roberts has published more than 50 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 explored topics such as race, reproduction, and motherhood in her scholarship, specifically focusing on the experiences of Black women.

Her article, "Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy" (Harvard Law Review, 1991), has been widely cited. Invention (The New Press, 2011) argues that America is once again on the brink of classifying population by race.

Roberts has received much praise for her work from notable sources such as Publishers Weekly and Anthony D. Romero, executive director, American Civil Liberties Union.

Leadership roles

She serves as chair of the board of directors of the Black Women's Health Imperative, on the board of directors of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, and on the advisory boards of the Center for Genetics and Society and Family Defense Center. She also serves on a national panel that is overseeing foster care reform in Washington State and on the Standards Working Group of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (stem cell research). She has received awards from the National Science Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.