Dorothy Roberts is George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology; Raymond Pace & Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights; and Professor of Africana Studies Director, Program on Race, Science and Society. She is an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law. Her pathbreaking work focuses on urgent contemporary issues in health, social justice, and bioethics, especially as they impact the lives of women, children and African-Americans. In this episode, we discuss her 2022 book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World and her 2019 Her major books include Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New Press, 2011); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002), and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997). She is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as a co-editor of six books on such topics as constitutional law and women and the law.
Read Dorothy Roberts’ Harvard Law Review Foreword, Abolition Constitutionalism (2019), and her November 2022 intervention in the Harvard Law Review Forum, Racism, Abolition, and Historical Resembalnce.