grossman

About Me

Joanna L. Grossman is the inaugural Ellen K. Solender Endowed Chair in Women and the Law at SMU Dedman School of Law in Dallas, Texas. After graduating with distinction from Stanford Law School, Professor Grossman began her career as a clerk for Ninth Circuit Judge William A. Norris. She also worked as staff counsel at the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, D.C. as a recipient of the Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellowship. In addition, she practiced law at the Washington, D.C. firm of Williams & Connolly LLP. Professor Grossman writes extensively on sex discrimination and workplace equality, with a particular focus on issues such as sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination. Her book, Nine to Five: How Gender, Sex and Sexuality Continue to Define the American Workplace (Cambridge, 2016), provides a lively and accessible discussion of contemporary cases and events that show gender continues to define the work experience in both predictable and surprising ways. She is also an expert in family law, especially parentage law and the state regulation of marriage. She is co-author (with Lawrence M. Friedman) of Inside the Castle: Law and the Family in 20th Century America (Princeton University Press, 2011), a comprehensive social history of U.S. family law.  She has authored or edited several other books, as well as dozens of scholarly articles.  She is also a regular columnist for Justia’s Verdict, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her work on parentage law.

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Publications
Nine to Five: How Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Continue to Define the American Workplace
Nine to Five: How Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Continue to Define the American Workplace

by Joanna L. Grossman

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Inside the Castle: Law and the Family in 20th Century America
Inside the Castle: Law and the Family in 20th Century America

by Joanna L. Grossman and Lawrence M. Friedman

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Gender & Law: Theory, Doctrine, Commentary, 7th Edition
Gender & Law: Theory, Doctrine, Commentary, 7th Edition

by Katherine T. Bartlett, Deborah L. Rhode, and Joanna L. Grossman

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Family Law in New York
Family Law in New York

Edited by Barbara Stark and Joanna L. Grossman

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Gender Equality Dimensions of Women's Equal Citizenship
Gender Equality Dimensions of Women's Equal Citizenship

Edited by Linda C. McClain and Joanna L. Grossman

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From Verdict
“Extrauterine Children” and Other Nonsense Wrought by the Fetal Personhood Movement In a bizarre ruling, the Alabama Supreme Court recently held that frozen embryos are children for purposes of the state’s wrongful death statute. In s...
Do No Harm: Texas Court Rules in Favor of Women Harmed by Abortion Ban’s Inadequate Protection for Medical Emergencies Earlier this year, the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a lawsuit, Zurawski v. State of Texas, on behalf of several women who needed emergent abor...
The Struggle Over Aretha Franklin’s Estate You might think that celebrities, who can make millions of dollars singing or playing basketball, would be able and willing to afford a good lawyer, a...
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03/19/2024
From the Blog
Raising Arizona Babies Arizona Supreme Court in McLaughlin v. Jones was asked an increasingly familiar question: Does the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges ...
Why Lesbian Co-Parents Still Live in Limbo Although the parenting rights of people in same-sex couples have generally been on the rise—particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2015 rulin...
So Many Unanswered Questions about ART Assisted reproductive technology (ART) surrounds us. Courts are certainly not strangers to the parentage questions that can arise out from situations ...
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Current Projects
What is the role of privacy in modern law and society? What is the role of privacy in modern law and society? With Lawrence M. Friedman (Stanford Law School), I am writing a book on the law and social norm...
Who is a legal parent? Who is a legal parent? I am writing a book that explores the complicated answer to this question.  It will examine the body of rules and doctrines tha...
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