Elizabeth Bartholet

Elizabeth Bartholet is the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and Faculty Director of the Child Advocacy Program which she founded in the fall of 2004.  She teaches civil rights and family law, specializing in child welfare, adoption and reproductive technology. Before joining the Harvard faculty, she was engaged in civil rights and public interest work, first with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and later as founder and director of the Legal Action Center, a non-profit organization in New York City focused on criminal justice and substance abuse issues. She has authored numerous articles as well as two books, Nobody's Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift, and the Adoption Alternative (1999) and Family Bonds: Adoption, Infertility, and the New World of Child Production (1999). Her recent work advocates considering adoption from a human rights perspective, and calls attention to racial and cultural barriers to international adoption that she argues affect children's welfare. Bartholet's work has figured prominently in the national media, and she has won several awards for her writing and her related advocacy work in the area of adoption and child welfare.