Center Scholar: Michelle Oberman

Professor Oberman continues her work on mothers who kill, increasingly taking an international and comparative perspective on the topic. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Chile for 2011, where she will study the phenomenon of neonaticide as it occurs in a country in which abortion is completely prohibited. Her recent book, When Mothers Kill (New York University Press, 2008), was awarded the 2008 Outstanding Book of the Year Award from the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, the largest international group representing criminal justice scholars and practitioners.

Professor Oberman's focus on women's reproductive health and rights has led her to Central America, where she is working with community-based coalitions on issues of norm-clarification and education in El Salvador.

Her current writing passion and focus lies in a genre she has coined: "ethnographic legal scholarship." She has written two law review articles in this "new" voice:  ( Judging Vanessa: Norm Setting & Deviance in the Law of Motherhood, 15 Wm. & Mary J. Women & the Law 337 (2009) and Eva and her Baby (A Story of Adolescent Sex, Pregnancy, Longing, Love, Loneliness and Death), Duke J. Gender Pol’y & the Law (2009) In addition, she wrote an essay reconsidering the notorious Buck v. Bell case in light of contemporary mechanisms by which governments regulate reproduction. The essay is entitled Thirteen Ways of Looking at Buck v. Bell: Thoughts Occasioned by Paul Lombardo's Three Generations, No Imbeciles, Journal of Legal Education, Volume 59, Number 3 (February 2010).

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