Linda C. McClain teaches courses in property, family law, feminist legal theory, jurisprudence, and welfare law. Previously, she practiced litigation for five years at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Professor McClain was a Faculty Fellow in ethics at the Harvard University Center for Ethics and the Professions during the 1999-2000 academic year. She has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and University of Virginia School of Law. During the spring 2006 semester, she is visiting at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law.
Professor McClain is the author of the book, The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility (Harvard University Press, 2006), which offers a liberal feminist perspective on a number of contested issues of family law and policy. A central concern of her scholarship has been to elaborate an account of government's responsibility to foster in citizens the capacities for democratic and personal self-government, and of the place of families and other institutions of civil society in developing such capacities. More generally, her scholarship has engaged with prominent communitarian, civic republican, and feminist critiques of liberal legal and political theory, offering a reconstructive liberal feminist approach to such matters as privacy, reproductive rights and responsibilities, family regulation, and welfare policy. Her articles have appeared in many books and legal journals, including Cornell Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Fordham Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, Southern California Law Review, Texas Law Review, William & Mary Law Journal, and Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. She has organized major symposia on "Legal and Constitutional Implications of Calls to Revive Civil Society," in 75 Chicago-Kent Law Review 289-612 (2000) and on "Marriage, Families, and Democracy," in 32 Hofstra Law Review 23-421 (2003).
Representative publications include: "‘Atomistic Man' Revisited: Liberalism, Connection, and Feminist Jurisprudence," 65 Southern California Law Review 1171 (1992); "Rights and Irresponsibility," 43 Duke Law Journal 989 (1994); "Toleration, Autonomy, and Governmental Promotion of Good Lives: Beyond ‘Empty' Toleration to Toleration as Respect," 59 Ohio State Law Journal 19 (1998); "Negotiating Gender and (Free and Equal) Citizenship: The Place of Associations," 72 Fordham Law Review 1569 (2004); and "What Place for Marriage (E)quality in Marriage Promotion?," in Marriage Proposals: Questioning A Legal Status (Anita Bernstein ed., New York University Press, 2006). Professor McClain won Hofstra University's Stessin Prize for Outstanding Scholarship for her article, "‘Irresponsible' Reproduction," 47 Hastings Law Journal 339 (1996).
Professor McClain serves on the advisory board of the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project. She is a member of the Council on Contemporary Families and the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. She serves on the executive committee of the AALS Section on Family Law.
