CATHARINE A MACKINNON is a lawyer, teacher, writer, activist, and expert on sex equality
She has a B.A. from Smith College (1968), a J.D. from Yale Law School(1977), and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University(1987). Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School since 1990, she taught for the previous decade at Yale, the University of Chicago, UCLA, Minnesota, Harvard, Osgoode Hall (Toronto), and Stanford.
Beginning in the mid 1970's, Catherine MacKinnon pioneered the legal claim for sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination and, with Andrea Dworkin beginning in 1983, conceived and wrote ordinances recognizing pornography as a violation of civil rights. The U.S. Supreme Court accepted her theory of sexual harassment in 1986 and the Supreme Court of Canada adopted, in part, approaches that she created with the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) to equality (1989), pornography (1992) and hate speech (1991).
Professor MacKinnon is the author of Sexual Harassment of Working Women (Yale, 1979); Feminism Unmodified (Harvard, 1987); Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Harvard, 1989); Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women's Equality (With Andrea Dworkin) (OAP, 1988); and Only Words (Harvard, 1993), as well as numerous articles.