Catharine A. MacKinnon

Catharine A. MacKinnon
MacKinnon at the Brattle Theatre, Cambridge, 2006
Born	Catharine Alice MacKinnon (1946-10-07) October 7, 1946 (age 77) Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.
Academic background
Education	Smith College (BA) Yale University (MSL, JD, PhD)
Influences	Andrea Dworkin, August Bebel, György Lukács, Karl Marx, Simone de Beauvoir
Academic work
Discipline	Legal scholar
Institutions	University of Michigan York University University of Minnesota
Main interests	Radical feminism, socialist feminism, feminist legal theory
Influenced	Andrea Dworkin, Martha Nussbaum

Catharine Alice MacKinnon (born October 7, 1946) is an American feminist legal scholar, activist, and author. She is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, where she has been tenured since 1990, and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. From 2008 to 2012, she was the special gender adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.^[1][2]

As an expert on international law, constitutional law, political and legal theory, and jurisprudence, MacKinnon focuses on women's rights and sexual abuse and exploitation, including sexual harassment, rape, prostitution, sex trafficking and pornography. She was among the first to argue that pornography is a civil rights violation, and that sexual harassment in education and employment constitutes sex discrimination.^[1]

MacKinnon is the author of over a dozen books, including Sexual Harassment of Working Women (1979);^[3] Feminism Unmodified (1987), Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989); Only Words (1993); a casebook, Sex Equality (2001 and 2007); Women's Lives, Men's Laws (2005); and Butterfly Politics (2017).