Kimberly Mutcherson
Professor of Law
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
Kimberly Mutcherson is a Professor of Law and former Co-Dean at Rutgers Law School in Camden. She was the first woman, the first Black person, and the first member of the LGBTQ community to be a Dean at Rutgers Law. Professor Mutcherson is a reproductive justice scholar whose work focuses on assisted reproduction and abortion among other topics. Cambridge University Press released her edited volume, Feminist Judgments: Reproductive Justice Rewritten in 2020.
In 2023, Professor Mutcherson received the Trailblazer Award from the New Jersey Women Lawyer’s Association. Professor Mutcherson was a co-recipient of the 2021 M. Shanara Gilbert Human Rights Award from the Society of American Law Teachers and the 2020 Association of American Law Schools inaugural Impact Award as one of the creators of the Law Deans Antiracist Clearinghouse Project. Also in 2021, the Rutgers Law School Black Law Students Association honored her with the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Champions of Social Justice Award and the Association of Black Women Lawyers of New Jersey celebrated her as a Distinguished Changemaker. Professor Mutcherson 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 and 2014.
Professor Mutcherson has served as a Scholar in Residence at the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership at NYU Law School, 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 earned her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and her J.D. from Columbia Law School. Upon graduation from Columbia, she received the Kirkland and Ellis Fellowship for post-graduate public interest work. Prior to entering academia, Professor Mutcherson was a consulting attorney at 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).
The Color Line: Democracy, Race, and the January 6 Insurrection (appearing in Beyond Imagination?: The January 6 Insurrection, West Academic Publishing, January 2022).
Legal Considerations on the Declaration of Death by Neurologic Criteria in the Pregnant Patient (appearing in Death Determination by Neurologic Criteria: Areas of Controversy and Consensus, forthcoming November 2022).