Rate My Professor Sacha Coupet

Sacha M. Coupet is the Morris I. Leibman Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Mission Innovation at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, where she has served on the faculty since 2004, advancing to Associate Professor in 2010. She earned an A.B. in Psychology and French from Washington University in 1991, an M.A. in Psychology in 1994 and a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology in 1997 from the University of Michigan—where her dissertation examined predictors of adjustment in elderly kinship caregivers—and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 2000, serving as James Wilson Fellow and Associate Editor of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Prior to Loyola, Coupet clerked for Judge Theodore A. McKee on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and Judge Joseph A. Greenaway, Jr. on the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey. She also held positions as Dean’s Fellow and Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan Law School, teaching in the Child Advocacy Law Clinic, and continues as faculty in the Bergstrom Child Welfare Summer Fellowship Training program. Additionally, she is Distinguished Fellow at the University of Houston Law Center’s Center for Children, Law and Policy. Coupet teaches courses including Family Law, Child, Parent & State, International and Comparative Family Law, Torts, Science in the Law, and Alternative Dispute Resolution.

Coupet’s scholarship centers on the regulation of families, addressing privileges, rights, and interests of parents, children, and caregivers, with emphasis on child and family welfare policy, kinship care, children’s rights, juvenile justice, and therapeutic jurisprudence. Her publications include the co-edited book Children, Sexuality and the Law (NYU Press, 2015); articles such as “What Price Liberty? The Search for Equality for Kinship-Caregiving Families,” 2013 Mich. St. L. Rev. 1249; “Ain’t I a Parent?: Exclusion of Kinship Caregivers from the Debate over Expansions of Parenthood,” 34 NYU Rev. L. & Soc. Change 595 (2010); “The Subtlety of State Action in Privatized Child Welfare Services,” 11 Chapman L. Rev. 85 (2007); and more recent works like “The Ontological Expansiveness of ‘Parental Rights’ Rhetoric in K–12 Public Schools” (2024) and “Singing in the Key of Dobbs: Historical Inquiries into the Institutionalization of Support for Families and Children” (2023). She co-founded the AALS Section on Children & the Law in 2006, served as its Chair (2009-2010), and is Chair-Elect of the AALS Section on Poverty Law. Coupet led the task force drafting Loyola Law’s anti-racist mission statement in 2020, promoting racial justice and diversity in legal education. She has presented nationally on family law, child welfare, LGBTQ youth, and inclusion in law practice, incorporating social science into legal policy.