Critical Perspectives on Policing Intimate Partner Violence

Caroline Bettinger-López is a Professor of Law and Director of the Human Rights Clinic at the University of Miami School of Law. She also serves as an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and is a recipient of a Roddenberry Fellowship for her COURAGE in Policing Project (COURAGE=Community Oriented and United Responses to Address Gender Violence and Equality).

The Human Rights Clinic, under Professor Bettinger-López’s leadership, and three South Florida-based community organizations are the joint recipients of a grant from the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund to start the Voces Unidas/Vwa Ini Project, to support low-wage immigrant women workers who have experienced workplace sexual misconduct or related retaliation. 

From 2015 to 2017 Professor Bettinger-López worked in the Obama Administration, where she served as the White House Advisor on Violence Against Women, a senior advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, and a member of the White House Council on Women and Girls. At the White House, her responsibilities included co-chairing the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, chairing the U.S. Government Inter-Agency Working Group on Violence Against Women, co-coordinating the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, and developing the cabinet-level North American Working Group on Violence Against Indigenous Women and Girls (whose inaugural meeting in October 2016 included the participation of all attorneys general and indigenous affairs cabinet members from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico).

Professor Bettinger-López’s scholarship, practice, and teaching concern international human rights law and policy advocacy, violence against women, gender and race discrimination, immigrants’ rights, and clinical legal education. She focuses on the implementation of human rights norms at the domestic level, principally in the United States and Latin America. Professor Bettinger-López regularly litigates and engages in other forms of advocacy before the Inter-American Human Rights system, the United Nations, federal and state courts, and legislative bodies.

Professor Bettinger-López is lead counsel on Jessica Lenahan (Gonzales) v. United States (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 2011), the first international human rights case brought by a domestic violence victim against the U.S. She has worked extensively with advocates and government officials in Canada on issues of violence against Indigenous women and girls, challenged Stand Your Ground laws before the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, collaborated with advocates in Miami and Haiti to stop U.S. deportations to post-earthquake Haiti, and litigated against the Dominican Republic for its mass expulsions of Haitian nationals and Dominicans of Haitian descent.

Leigh Goodmark is a Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Frances King Carey School of Law.  Professor Goodmark teaches Family Law, Gender and the Law, and Gender Violence and the Law, and directs the Gender Violence Clinic, a clinic providing direct representation in matters involving intimate partner abuse, sexual assault, trafficking, and other cases involving gender violence.  Professor Goodmark’s scholarship focuses on intimate partner violence.  She is the author of Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to Intimate Partner Violence (University of California Press, forthcoming 2018) and A Troubled Marriage: Domestic Violence and the Legal System (New York University 2012), which was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of 2012.  She is the co-editor of Comparative Perspectives on Gender Violence: Lessons from Efforts Worldwide (Oxford 2015).  Professor Goodmark’s work on intimate partner violence has also appeared in numerous journals, law reviews, and publications, including Violence Against Women, the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, the Harvard Journal on Gender and the Law, the Yale Journal on Law and Feminism, and Fusion.net. From 2003 to 2014, Professor Goodmark was on the faculty at the University of Baltimore School of Law, where she served as Director of Clinical Education and Co-director of the Center on Applied Feminism.  From 2000 to 2003, Professor Goodmark was the Director of the Children and Domestic Violence Project at the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law.  Before joining the Center on Children and the Law, Professor Goodmark represented battered women and children in the District of Columbia in custody, visitation, child support, restraining order, and other civil matters.  Professor Goodmark is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Law School.

Professor Gruber joined the University of Colorado faculty in 2010. In 2012, the students honored her with the Outstanding New Faculty Member Award. In 2013, she delivered the Austin W. Scott, Jr. Lecture, a public lecture by a faculty member engaged in a significant scholarly project. Gruber received Gilbert Goldstein Fellowship for scholarship in 2015 and the Jules Milstein Award in 2017, given to the best recent faculty work of scholarship, for her article, A Provocative Defense. Professor Gruber has been a fellow in the University's Center for Values and Social Policy since 2015. Prior to Colorado, Gruber was a professor of law at the University of Iowa and a founding faculty member at Florida International University Law School. In 2017, Gruber was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, where she taught criminal law and a seminar on feminism and crime control.

Professor Gruber received her B.A. in philosophy from U.C. Berkeley, summa cum laude. She received her law degree magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was an editor on the Harvard Women's Law Journal and Harvard International Law Journal and founder of the Interracial Law Students' Association. After law school, Professor Gruber clerked for U.S. District Court judge James L. King in Miami, Florida and then served as a felony trial attorney with the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C. and the Federal Public Defender in Miami.

Professor Gruber currently teaches and writes in the areas of criminal law and procedure, critical theory, feminism, and comparative/international law. Her scholarship focuses primarily on feminist efforts to strengthen criminal law responses to crimes against women. Her widely taught and frequently cited articles combine insights from practicing as a public defender with extensive research to articulate a feminist critique of punitive and authoritarian laws on violence against women. In addition to her writing on gender and crime, Professor Gruber has written a book on comparative criminal procedure, articles on treaty law and human rights, and articles on criminal procedure and privacy. Her articles appear in leading journals, including California Law Review, Northwestern Law Review, and Iowa Law Review. Her forthcoming book The Feminist War On Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women's Liberation in Mass Incarceration (U.C. Press 2020), tells the story how feminists, in their quest to secure women's protection from domestic violence and rape, became soldiers in the war on crime and contributors to mass incarceration It sketches a path forward for young women, activists, and lawmakers to oppose violence against women without reinforcing the American prison state.

Professor Gruber was elected to membership in the American Law Institute in 2016, and has been an adviser to ALI Model Penal Code sexual assault project since 2012.  As a member of the University of Colorado's Boulder Faculty Assembly and a chair on the University's grievance committee, she has investigated high-profile campus sexual assault and harassment controversies. A frequent public speaker on criminal justice, Professor Gruber has appeared on PBS, Fox News, ABC, and is quoted in various news outlets, including the New Yorker, Slate, and the New York Times.

Professor Stoever has extensive experience teaching domestic violence clinics and engaging in scholarship in the areas of domestic violence law, family law, feminist legal theory, and clinical legal theory.

In Professor Stoever’s clinical teaching, she supervises law students representing clients in family law, immigration, and other legal and non-legal interventions into domestic violence. Professor Stoever began teaching as a Georgetown Clinical Teaching Fellow and Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow, where she taught in Georgetown University Law Center’s Domestic Violence Clinic and was trained in clinical pedagogy. Prior to joining the faculty at UCI Law, Professor Stoever was a faculty member at American University Washington College of Law and Seattle University School of Law, where she taught Family Law and Domestic Violence Law and directed the Domestic Violence Clinic. Professor Stoever previously served as a judicial clerk, worked at legal aid offices and at a shelter for teenage girls, and was a live-in staff member at a shelter for homeless families. She graduated from Harvard Law School and received her LL.M. from Georgetown University Law Center. At Harvard Law School, she was a student attorney at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.

Professor Stoever’s scholarly work focuses on the multiple oppressions domestic violence survivors face and explores ways that the law can better respond to complex experiences of intimate partner abuse. In addressing the interdisciplinary problem of domestic violence, her scholarship frequently brings together the worlds of law, public health, psychology, and survivors’ lived experiences.