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Professor Dolgin has a B.A. in philosophy from Barnard College, a Ph.D. in anthropology from Princeton University, and a J.D. from the Yale Law School. Her scholarly work combines insights from anthropology and legal scholarship.
Professor Dolgin is the director of the Hofstra Institute for Health Law and Policy. Before coming to Hofstra she taught anthropology at Columbia University and served as an associate at Davis, Polk & Wardwell in Manhattan. In 1988-89 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She has also held appointments as a visiting professor of law at Cornell Law School, Boston University School of Law, and Cardozo School of Law.
Professor Dolgin's books include Jewish Identity and the JDL (Princeton University Press), Symbolic Anthropology (co-edited, Columbia University Press), Defining the Family (NYU Press), and Bioethics and the Law (co-authored with Lois Shepherd, Aspen Publishers).
Defining the Family examines the complicated, often contradictory, responses of the law to the radical changes that have altered the scope and meaning of the American family since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Bioethics and the Law, co-authored with Professor Lois Shepherd, is a casebook intended for use by practitioners and in law school teaching. It is structured around a life span approach to bioethical questions. In addition to topics generally covered in accounts of bioethics, the book includes analyses of public health (including bioterrorism), access to health care, and conflicts of interest faced by health care providers. Professors Dolgin and Shepherd are now preparing the book's second edition (scheduled for publication by Aspen Publishers in 2009).
Professor Dolgin has written many articles, published in a variety of law reviews, other scholarly journals, and edited volumes. Much of this work has analyzed legal responses to shifts in the family (including those occasioned by developments in reproductive technology and by the "new genetics") and to shifts in the structure of health care in the United States and elsewhere. Her most recent work focuses on disparities in health and in health care. She is now writing a book analyzing the failure of the United States to construct a system of health care delivery that provides universal coverage.
Professor Dolgin lectures widely in the United States and abroad about health care law, bioethics, and family law.