Nancy Levit, Curators’ and Edward D. Ellison Professor of Law, (B.A. Bates College, 1980, J.D., University of Kansas, 1984). Joint appointment with the School of Law and the Women’s and Gender Studies Faculty.  Constitutional law, employment discrimination, jurisprudence, torts, defamation and privacy, and feminist legal theory. Author of: The Happy Lawyer: Making a Good Life in the Law (forthcoming 2010) (with Douglas O. Linder); Feminist Legal Theory: A Primer (2006) (with Robert R.M. Verchick); Jurisprudence—Classical and Contemporary: From Natural Law to Postmodernism (2002) (with Robert L. Hayman, Jr. & Richard Delgado); The Gender Line: Men, Women, and the Law (2000). Editorial Associate of the Journal of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers.  Recipient of the UMKC Law School Elmer P. Pierson Faculty Teaching Award (three times), the Student Voted Professor of the Year award (twice), the Daniel L. Brenner Faculty Publishing Award (three times), and, in 2000, the UKC Trustees Faculty Fellowship and the N.T. Veatch Award for Distinguished Research and Creative Activity.  In 2004, the UMKC campus’s nominee for the University of Missouri Presidential Teaching Award and in 2004 the recipient of the Missouri Governor’s Teaching Award.

My scholarship centers primarily on legal theory, although I have written on topics ranging from single sex education, the constitutionality of teaching creationism in public schools, critical race theory, matrimonial law, and comparable worth, to expediting death penalty cases, the use of narrative in legal methodology, and the problems heuristics pose for feminist legal theory. Our jurisprudence book, Jurisprudence—Classical to Contemporary: From Natural Law to Postmodernism, covers the spectrum of legal theories, from natural law, positive and legal realism to law and science, law and literature, feminist theory, critical race theory, postmodernism, and pragmatism. Feminist Legal Theory: A Primer provides a concise introduction to the diverse strands of feminist legal theory and to the array of substantive legal issues relevant to women’s and gender studies.  It explains the importance of the role of law in resolving contemporary gender issues and explores specific topical areas, including intimate violence, family relations (divorce, custody and adoption), reproductive rights, education, employment, pornography and hate speech, sports, the regulation of sexuality and sexual orientation, and global or international issues of gender. The Gender Line: Men, Women & The Law, describes the phenomenon of sex separatism: how boys and girls, men and women grow up and live in different cultures of gender. It explains how law legitimizes this social segregation of the sexes and is instrumental in shaping concepts of masculinity. It encourages feminist scholars to address the situations of men and to recognize that the oppressions of men and women are intertwined.