2015-2016 Sabbatical Fellowship: Solangel Maldonado
We are pleased to announce that Solangel Maldonado, J.D., will be joining the Center for the Study of Law and Culture on Sabbatical Fellowship for the 2015-2016 academic year. Her work with the Center includes a project that examines how the law influences who we desire and choose as intimate partners and explores the economic, social, and political implications of these choices. The central claim of which is that romantic preferences, as shaped by law, perpetuate segregation by limiting, on the basis of race, individuals’ prospects for marriage, economic and social mobility, and acceptance into society as full citizens.
Solangel Maldonado is the Joseph M. Lynch Professor of Law and a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia Law School. Her research and teaching interests include family law, feminist legal theory, race and the law, and international and comparative family law. Over the past decade, her scholarship has focused on the intersection of race and family law and the law’s influence on social norms of post-separation parenthood. She is currently working on a book that examines how the law shapes romantic preferences and how these preferences perpetuate racial hierarchy and economic and social inequality.
Professor Maldonado is one of the reporters of the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Children and the Law (in progress) and a co-editor of Family Law in the World Community (Carolina Academic Press, 3rd ed. 2015) (with D. Marianne Blair, Merle H. Weiner, and Barbara Stark). She also serves on the editorial board of the Family Court Review.
Prior to joining the Seton Hall faculty, Professor Maldonado was a litigation associate with Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Handler, LLP and with Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood in New York. She also clerked for then District Court Judge Joseph A. Greenaway, Jr., now on the United States Court of Appeals. She received her B.A. from Columbia College and her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and the Managing Editor of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law.
2016 and 2017 Spring Fellowship: Rose Cuison Villazor
Professor Rose Cuison Villazor is Professor of Law and Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall Research Scholar at the University of California at Davis School of Law. Her current writing projects include researching the history of “non-citizen national status” and its contemporary implications on citizenship; the immigration status of guest workers in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and whether they should be granted a path to citizenship; and the federal regulation of marriage in Germany post-World War II.
Among her many publications are numerous articles in major law reviews and journals, including the New York University Law Review, the Washington University Law Review, and the California Law Review. Villazor is also co-editing several books.
In the spring of 2014, Professor Villazor served as a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center for the Study of Law and Society. She received the 2011 Derrick A. Bell Award, which is given by the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Minority Section to a junior faculty member who, through activism, mentoring, teaching and scholarship, has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system, or social justice. She served as a Human Rights Fellow at Columbia Law School from 2004 until 2006 where she focused on the domestic application of international human rights.
Villazor obtained her LL.M. from Columbia Law School after receiving her J.D. cum laude from American University’s Washington College of Law.