MacKinnon, Catherine A. (1946–)

American feminist writer. Born Oct 1, 1946, in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Smith College, BA, 1968; Yale Law School, JD, 1977; Yale University, PhD, 1987.

Legal scholar who pioneered legal claim for sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination and published 1st book, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (1979), was ultimately vindicated when US Supreme Court declared sexual harassment to be a form of discrimination (1986); with Andrea Dworkin, wrote Pornography and Civil Rights (1988); helped Women's Legal Education and Action Fund to craft approaches which were adopted by Supreme Court of Canada with regards to sexual equality (1989), pornography (1992), and hate speech (1991); published Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (1987) and Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989); became professor of law at University of Michigan Law School (1990) and visiting professor at University of Chicago Law School (1997); also taught at Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Minnesota, UCLA, Osgoode Hall in Toronto and University of Basel in Switzerland; provided pro bono co-counsel for Croatian and Muslim women and children seeking remedies under international law for Serbian genocidal sexual atrocities (1990s), winning damage award of $745 million (2000); served as co-director for Lawyers Alliance for Women (LAW) Project of Equality Now; also wrote Only Words (1993), In Harm's Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (edited with Andrea Dworkin, 1998) and Sex Equality (2001).