CRR Announces New Columbia Law Fellow

The Center is excited to announce Harvard law student Lisa Kelly as the 2014-2016 recipient of the Center for Reproductive Rights-Columbia Law School Fellowship.

Lisa has been selected from an extremely competitive applicant base for the two-year appointment, which is a full-time academic position designed to prepare recent law school graduates for legal academic careers in reproductive health and human rights. Lisa is the program’s sixth fellow.

Competing with a pool of applications with stellar academic records, Lisa distinguished herself as an up-and-coming scholar with an impressive research agenda, a focus on pertinent issues, and an insightful and thoughtful doctoral dissertation.

She is currently completing her S.J.D. (Doctorate of Law) at Harvard Law School.  During her doctorate, Lisa was a Trudeau Scholar, a Doctoral Fellow of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow, and a Fellow of the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School.  Her dissertation—Governing the Child: Parental Authority, State Power and the School in North America—analyzes legal struggles from the mid-nineteenth century through the present over race, corporal punishment and the disciplinary reach of school authorities.

Lisa has also published in the areas of family law and reproductive justice, including a forthcoming chapter, “Reckoning with Narratives of Innocent Suffering in Transnational Abortion Litigation,” in Abortion Law in Transnational Perspective: Cases and Controversies (Cook, Erdman &, Dickens, eds., UPenn). 

For the purpose of the Fellowship, “reproductive rights” is broadly defined to include a range of issues regarding women, families, sexuality, violence, and parenting.  The program aims to engender an interest in these issues, with the hopes that the developing legal scholar will go on to research and write about factors that impact women’s reproductive health.

“The fellowship is a great opportunity for scholars with an interest in women’s issues to gain insight into the practical implications of their theoretical work,” says Nicole Tuszynski, manager of the Center’s Law School Initiative, which coordinates the fellowship program. “The Center is really committed to this program because it is a unique way to support future legal academics who are sympathetic to reproductive rights issues and may produce impactful scholarship in the area.”     

During her fellowship, Lisa will split her time between the Center—working on projects central to reproductive justice—and Columbia, where she will focus on her research and interact with the law school’s community of legal fellows. Lisa plans to continue working on questions concerning young people and sexuality, including a project examining the role of age of sexual consent laws and enforcement in recent antiabortion campaigns in the United States.  

“I have long followed and admired the work of the Center for Reproductive Rights.  Seeing firsthand how the organization mobilizes for reproductive justice will provide unique insights on law and social movements,” says Lisa. “I am also looking forward immensely to joining the vibrant community of scholars working on gender and sexual justice at Columbia Law School.  I am confident that I will benefit greatly from their perspectives and am excited to be an active contributor to this scholarly community.”  

Columbia Law professors Carol Sanger – the Barbara Aronstein Black Professor of Law – and Katherine Franke – the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Director of Center for Gender and Sexuality Law Katherine Franke oversee Columbia’s half of the program.

“Columbia Law School has been delighted to build this partnership with the Center for Reproductive Rights. Over the last five years we have had the privilege of working with truly gifted young scholars who plan careers in the legal academy writing on a range of topics related to reproductive rights and justice,” says Franke. “Given the depth of our faculty’s research interests in this area, and the strength of our Center for Gender &, Sexuality Law, Columbia Law School has developed a vibrant, rigorous, and nurturing environment for our CRR-CLS fellows to launch their academic careers.”

Lisa will begin her work at the Center this summer, joining current CRR-CLS Fellow, Rana Jaleel. Rana’s work examines how feminist theorizations of violence against women interfaced with legal doctrine in the 1990s to establish war rape and sexual violence as violations of human rights and international humanitarian criminal law.