Kathryn Abrams, professor of law at Cornell University's Law School and a nationally recognized scholar on feminist jurisprudence, has been named the winner of the 2000 Anne Lukingbeal Award.

The Lukingbeal annual award, which was presented to Abrams in April of this year, was established in 1999 by the Women's Law Coalition (WLC), a student group at the Law School. Its members created the award to celebrate those who have contributed to the positive experience of women at the Law School. In doing so, they also hoped to create an enduring tribute to Anne Lukingbeal, an associate dean and dean of students at the school who was also the first winner, in 1999.

Lukingbeal had high praise for this year's choice: "Among my colleagues at the Law School, no one has invested more of her time and talent in the professional nurturing of our students, men as well as women, than Kathy Abrams," Lukingbeal said. "She is not only a scholar of some renown and a terrific teacher, but she is a role model for all of us who are continually seeking ways to combine our professional and personal roles into a balanced and productive life."

"It's a pleasure to be honored by an organization whose work in the Law School I so greatly respect," said Abrams. "And it's a particular pleasure to be honored in the name of Anne Lukingbeal, a wonderful colleague and friend, who is absolutely tireless in her commitment to the students at the school."

Abrams teaches courses on feminist jurisprudence, constitutional law, voting and political participation at the school. In her popular Feminism and Gender Discrimination course, she introduces students to a range of feminist theories that have shaped legal thought and doctrine and then discusses such gender-specific issues as sexual harassment, abortion, rape and pornography and the way that they have been addressed by the legal system.

"Kathy has been a tireless force for effectuating real and substantial change at the law school on behalf of women and minorities for close to a decade," said Ali Nathan, a third-year law student who is a member of the WLC and outgoing editor in chief of the Cornell Law Review, which Abrams advises. "She is precisely the kind of person we had in mind when we established the

award. She served on the gender study committee, a group that has substantially improved the atmosphere and opportunities for women in the Law School. And she has been an irreplaceable force of support for women in the school. Anyone here will tell you she's the best person to turn to if you're wondering how to further a career in women's rights law or want help organizing a WLC conference, or responding to sexist language or a sexual harassment incident or improving the gender dynamics in a classroom -- or a whole range of other problems."

On leave this semester, Abrams spent most of it working on her book, tentatively titled Changing the Subject: Depicting Women's Agency in Feminist Legal Theory and Legal Doctrine, and presenting chapters to colleagues at Boston University and Rutgers-Camden law schools and the Duke University Women's Studies Program. The book explores the ways in which feminist legal theory depicts women's agency, or capacity for self-direction, under circumstances of oppression. Abrams says: "The book argues that legal doctrine relating to women's inequality has tended to describe women either as wholly autonomous or as wholly compromised by discriminatory treatment, and that feminist legal theorists and advocates should draw on the analytic resources provided by feminist theory to create a more nuanced and variable picture in law of women's self-assertion."

The author of several dozen articles on such topics as employment discrimination, feminist jurisprudence and minority-vote dilution, Abrams earned a B.A. from Harvard-Radcliffe in 1980, a J.D. law degree from Yale in 1984, then clerked for an Alabama Circuit Court of Appeals judge for a year before joining the faculty at Boston University Law School in 1985. She came to Cornell in 1992, where she was a professor of law and an associate professor of ethics and public life in the College of Arts and Sciences. During that time she earned a Merrill Presidential Scholar Outstanding Educator citation and the Alice and Constance Cook Award for service to women at Cornell, an award also won by Lukingbeal. Abrams then taught briefly at Northwestern University and Indiana University-Bloomington law schools before rejoining the Cornell Law School faculty in 1997, again as a professor of law. Next fall, she will return to her joint appointment in the Law School and Arts and Sciences' Program on Ethics and Public Life.

She was acting director of Cornell's Women's Studies Program in 1998-99. She is married to William Kell, Cornell's J. Thomas Clark Professor of Entrepreneurship and Personal Enterprise and director of the Law School's Small Children/Small Business Clinic. They have two children, Eli, 7, and Maya,4, and live on campus as a faculty family in residence at Balch Hall.