Biography

A visiting assistant professor at Hofstra University School of Law in 2008-2009, Professor Abramowicz is an assistant professor of law at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, Michigan. Her scholarship focuses on the history of child custody law and of legal adoption, and on the place of childhood in the troubled intersection between family law and other areas of law, especially contract law. She teaches courses on family law, contracts, adoption in law and literature, and civil procedure. Her work has appeared in the Columbia Law Review, and her forthcoming article, Childhood and the Limits of Contract, will be published in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities in fall 2008.

Professor Abramowicz is currently writing an article titled “The Forgotten Child: Reframing the Legal Canon.” It examines the intersection of family law with other fields such as criminal law, contracts, and immigration law. The article proposes that greater attention to the interests and needs of children in these areas will improve decisionmaking, and offers a model for when family law’s “best interests” standard should play a role in adjudication of cases that involve children only indirectly. She is also working on a book, tentatively titled The Impossible Contract: Law, Parentage, and the Victorian Novel, that examines the connections between Victorian child custody law, the Victorian novel, and the rise of freedom of contract.

Professor Abramowicz holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Columbia University. She received her law degree from Columbia Law School, where she was a Review & Essays Editor of the Columbia Law Review and a Kent Scholar. After receiving her J.D., she was awarded a Fellowship in the Program on Careers in Law Teaching at Columbia Law School. She then served as a law clerk to the Hon. Amalya L. Kearse of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

 Curriculum Vitae