Martha Albertson Fineman, the Dorothea S. Clarke Professor of Feminist Jurisprudence at Cornell University Law School, has been awarded a grant of $824,000 from an anonymous donor to sponsor a three-year exchange program for faculty and students interested in gender, sexuality and the family.

The grant will allow faculty and graduate students to study in Canada and Northern Ireland and for scholars from those regions to come to Cornell for periods ranging from several weeks to a full academic semester.

"This exchange program, which is focused on the process of incorporating norms of international human rights into domestic law, is unique in its attention to the institutions of human intimacy, such as the family," says Fineman.

"The goals of the program," she says, "are to train and broaden the perspective of current and future faculty by exposing them to alternative conceptual models in legal systems that spring from a common origin. The grant also will provide the opportunity for significant collaboration, hopefully resulting in the production of innovative comparative educational materials. The grant also offers an opportunity for scholars from the United States to learn from their counterparts in societies where discourse about human rights is widespread. It is anticipated that this exposure will lead to the infusion of emerging human rights norms in scholarly and policy analyses in the United States."

Canada and Northern Ireland were chosen for the exchanges with the United States because they are at very different historical moments in their evolution in regard to human rights jurisprudence and because they demonstrate different levels of tolerance for non-traditional families.

Fineman also directs the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, which she founded and brought to Cornell when she relocated here from Columbia University. It complements the exchange program grant in that it is interdisciplinary and draws scholars from many English-speaking countries. Each semester workshops and "uncomfortable conversations" are held to address issues relating to gender and the law. Since relocating to Cornell in January 2000, the Feminism and Legal Theory Project has sponsored workshops on such topics as "Inclusion and Exclusion" and "Discrimination and Inequality." The "uncomfortable conversations" have broached questions such as "Children: Public Good or Individual Responsibility?" as well as fostering dialogue among advocates for women and advocates for children. This last conversation explored issues relating to divorce, welfare and child abuse and neglect where those advocating for women and those advocating for children might disagree on the appropriate policy to pursue. In April, the project will sponsor a workshop to consider feminist critiques of corporations and capitalism.