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About Dorothy
Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, holding joint appointments in the Law School, Department of Sociology, and Department of Africana Studies. She is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights and the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. In Law, her scholarship addresses critical issues at the intersection of race, gender, class, and public policy, including reproductive justice, child welfare systems, policing, family regulation, bioethics, medicine, and the sociology of science. Roberts earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1980 and a B.A. from Yale College in 1977. Prior to joining Penn in 2012 as the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, she was a faculty member at Rutgers University and Northwestern University School of Law.
Roberts has authored influential books such as Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997), Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2001), Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New Press, 2011), and Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books, 2022). She has published more than 100 articles and essays in prestigious outlets, including the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, and contributions to the 1619 Project.
Roberts has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and National Academy of Medicine. Other honors include the 2024 MacArthur Fellowship, 2025 Bioethics Founders' Award, Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award, American Psychiatric Association Solomon Carter Fuller Award, and honorary Doctor of Laws from Rutgers University. She has received fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and Fulbright Program. She chairs the board of the Black Women’s Health Imperative and serves on advisory boards for the Center for Genetics and Society and Family Defense Center.
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