Elizabeth Bartholet, an expert on civil rights and family law, is the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law at Harvard Law School where she has taught since 1977. Bartholet graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School.
She has served as staff counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and then founded the Legal Action Center, a public interest firm in New York City focused on criminal justice and substance abuse issues. At Harvard she has, in recent years, specialized in family law issues with a particular focus on child welfare, adoption and reproductive technology. She also writes, lectures, and consults on these issues.
Bartholet's work has triggered significant media attention. She has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Maury Povich Show, The Today Show, CBS This Morning, Good Morning America, The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, ABC Sunday Night News, and Nightline, and has done many dozens of interviews with National Public Radio, and other radio and TV programs. Her views on child welfare and reproductive issues have been regularly quoted in the national media, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, The Nation, The New Republic, Vogue, and American Prospect. She has been featured in several TV film documentaries and has given many dozens of speeches throughout the U.S. as well as in other countries.
Professor Bartholet’s publications include:
NOBODY’S CHILDREN: ABUSE AND NEGLECT, FOSTER DRIFT, AND THE ADOPTION ALTERNATIVE (Beacon Press, 1999); FAMILY BONDS: ADOPTION, INFERTILITY, AND THE NEW WORLD OF CHILD PRODUCTION (Beacon Press, 1999); International Adoption: The Human Rights Position,1 Global Policy 91 (2010); International Adoption: The Human Rights Issuesa, chapter in BABY MARKETS, Michele Goodwin ed. (Cambridge Univ. Press 2010); The Racial Disproportionality Movement in Child Welfare: False Facts and Dangerous Directions, 51 Ariz. L. Rev. 871 (2009); International Adoption: The Child’s Story, 24 Ga. St. U.L. Rev. (2008); International Adoption: Thoughts on the Human Rights Issues, 13 Buff. Hum. Rts. L. Rev.(2007); Where Do Black Children Belong? The Politics of Race Matching in Adoption, 139 Penn L. Rev. 1163 (1991); Beyond Biology: The Politics of Adoption & Reproduction, 2 Duke J. Gender L. & Pol’y 5 (Spring 1995); and Application of Title VII to Jobs in High Places, 95 Harv. L. Rev. 945 (1982).
NOBODY'S CHILDREN is an intense look at how we treat children in crisis. Professor Bartholet challenges the accepted orthodoxy that views children as belonging exclusively to their kinship and their racial groups and locks them into inadequate biological and foster homes. She asks us to apply the lessons learned from the battered women's movement as we consider battered children, and to question why family preservation ideology still reigns supreme when children rather than adult women are involved. Bartholet assesses promising new developments in the policy world, and warns of the pitfalls that threaten real progress. She asks us to take seriously, for the first time in our history, the adoption option, arguing that if we would only break down the racial and other barriers to adoption, we could give children the nurturing homes they need. She calls on the entire community to take responsibility for its children, to think of the children at risk of abuse and neglect as belonging to all of us.
Professor Bartholet has won several awards for her writing and her related advocacy work in the area of adoption and child welfare. Other awards include a “Media Achievement Award” in 1994 and the Radcliffe College Humane Recognition Award in 1997.