This talk engages the topic of citizenship as a matter of law, society, and the place and belonging of women. The talk suggests that persistent and lingering sex inequality has its roots in the fragile threads of women’s full citizenship. The result of this fragmented and fractured citizenship, quasi-citizenship, or non-citizenship has modern-day ramifications that spill out in the present across matters of reproductive health and justice, sexual violence, representation in office, weaponization and subjugation during conflict and crisis, and economic equality. This talk unravels the thread.

Michele Bratcher Goodwin is the Linda D. & Timothy J. O’Neill Professor of Constitutional Law and Global Health Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center. She is also Co-Faculty Director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. Previously, she served as a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Irvine where she was the founding director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy.  She is the 2022 recipient of the American Bar Association’s Margaret Brent Award as well as the 2022 Trailblazer Award from the Black Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles. In 2020-21, she received the Distinguished Senior Faculty Award for Research, the highest honor bestowed by the University of California. She was also the first law professor at the University of California, Irvine to receive this award. In 2021-22, she was named the Provost’s Distinguished Visiting Faculty Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute as well as an elected Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the Hastings Center.

Professor Goodwin is the author of Policing The Womb: Invisible Women and The Criminalization of Motherhood. She is also host of the popular podcast On The Issues at Ms. Magazine.