Co-Dean and Professor of Law
Kimberly Mutcherson
Rutgers Law School
E325
217 N 5th St
Camden, NJ 08102
856-225-6191

Kimberly Mutcherson is an award-winning professor whose scholarship focuses on reproductive justice, bioethics, and family and health law. She has presented her scholarship nationally and internationally and publishes extensively on assisted reproduction, families, and the law. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics and the Columbia Law School Center for Gender and Sexuality Law.

  • Biography
  • Publications
  • Courses Taught
  • Expertise
Biography

Kimberly Mutcherson is Co-Dean and Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School in Camden. Dean Mutcherson is a reproductive justice scholar whose work sits at the intersection of bioethics, health law, and family. She has a particular focus on assisted reproduction, abortion, disability, and medical decision-making for pregnant women and children. Cambridge University Press released her edited volume, Feminist Judgments: Reproductive Justice Rewritten in 2020.

In 2021, Dean Mutcherson received the Association of American Law Schools inaugural Impact Award as a co-founder of the Law Deans Antiracist Clearinghouse Project and the M. Shanara Gilbert Human Rights Award from the Society of American Law Teachers for the same Project. She received the Center for Reproductive Rights Innovation in Scholarship Award in 2013, a Chancellor’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2011, and the Women’s Law Caucus Faculty Appreciation Award in 2011 & 2014.

Dean Mutcherson has been a Senior Fellow/Sabbatical Visitor at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and her J.D. from Columbia Law School. She also received the Kirkland and Ellis Fellowship for post-graduate public interest work upon her graduation from Columbia. Prior to joining the faculty at Rutgers, Dean Mutcherson was a consulting attorney at the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy (now the Center for Reproductive Rights) and a Staff Attorney at the HIV Law Project.

Publications

No Way to Treat a Woman: Creating an Appropriate Standard for Resolving Medical Treatment Disputes Involving HIV-Positive Children, Harvard Women's Law Journal (spring 2002). 

Whose Body Is It Anyway? An Updated Model of Healthcare Decision-Making Rights for Adolescents, Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy (summer 2005). 

Minor Discrepancies: Forging a Common Understanding of Adolescent Competence in Healthcare Decision-making and Criminal Responsibility, Nevada Law Journal (summer 2006). 

Making Mommies: Law, Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis, and the Complications of Pre-Motherhood, Columbia Journal of Gender and Law (spring 2009)

Disabling Dreams of Parenthood:  The Fertility Industry, Anti-discrimination, and Parents with Disabilities (Law and Inequality:  A Journal of Theory and Practice, summer 2009)

What’s Love Got to Do with It? (Conversations on a Pregnant Man)  (Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, fall 2010)

Unsexing Care: Beyond Gendered Parenting Terms- A Response to Darren Rosenblum’s Unsex Mothering (Harvard Journal of Law & Gender on-line colloquium, winter 2012).

In Defense of Future Children: A Response to Cohen’s Beyond Best Interests (Minnesota Law Review Headnotes- on-line forum, spring 2012).

Welcome to the Wild West:  Protecting Access to Cross Border Fertility Care in the United States (Cornell Journal of Law & Public Policy, 2013)

Transformative Reproduction (The Journal of Gender, Race & Justice, winter 2013).

Open Fertility Borders:  Defending Access to Cross Border Fertility Care in the United States (chapter in anthology on Globalizing Healthcare- Oxford University Press, 2013).

How Parents Are Made: A Response to Discrimination in Baby Making: The Unconstitutional Treatment of Prospective Parents through Surrogacy (Indiana Law Journal, fall 2013)

Beyond Roe: Imagining the Future of Scholarship on Reproduction (Women’s Rights Law Reporter, spring/summer 2014).

Procreative Pluralism (Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice, winter 2015).

 Reproductive Technologies (entry in The Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality –Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).

 Blood and Water in a Post-Coital World (Family Law Quarterly, spring 2015)

 When is an Abortion Not an Abortion? (Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, summer 2015).

Procreative Rights in a Post-coital World (chapter in Oxford Handbook of Reproductive Ethics, winter 2016).

Roe v. Wade (re-written) (appearing in Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Opinions of the United States Supreme Court (Cambridge University Press, summer 2016).

Reproductive surrogates, risk, and the desire for genetic parenthood (Journal of Law and Biosciences, summer 2016).

Things That Money Can Buy: Reproductive Justice and the International Market for Gestational Surrogacy (North Carolina Journal of International Law, fall 2017).

Reproductive Rights without Resources or Recourse (Hastings Center Report, fall 2018).

Building Queer Families and the Ethics of Gestational Surrogacy (University of Richmond Law Rev, 2019).

When Your Job is to Marry Rich: Marriage as a Market in Hamilton (appearing in Hamilton and the Law: Reading Today’s Most Contentious Legal Issues through the Hit Musical, 2020).

Feminist Judgments: Reproductive Justice Rewritten (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

 

 

Courses Taught
Expertise
  • Bioethics
  • Family Law
  • Medicine (Law &)