CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – An expert on civil rights and family law at Harvard Law School is scheduled to speak Tuesday (April 29) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Elizabeth Bartholet will discuss “Race, Genes and Class: Shaping Child Welfare Policy in the 21st Century” beginning at 4 p.m. in the auditorium at the College of Law, 504 E. Pennsylvania Ave., Champaign.
Bartholet (pronounced BAR-thuh-let) is the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law at Harvard. A professor at Harvard since 1977, Bartholet served from 1968-1972 as staff counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. and then founded the Legal Action Center, a public interest firm in New York City focused on criminal justice and substance-abuse issues.
At Harvard, Bartholet in recent years has specialized in family law issues with a focus on child welfare, adoption and reproductive technology. She is the author of two books on adoption, “Nobody’s Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift and the Adoption Alternative” and “Family Bonds: Adoption, Infertility and the New World of Child Production” (both published in 1999 by Beacon Press).
She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1965 and earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1962 at Radcliffe College.
Bartholet’s talk is part of the Visiting Scholars Series of the Children and Family Research Center in the School of Social Work at Illinois. The event is co-sponsored by the law school.
