Solangel Maldonado

2015 to 2016

We are pleased to announce that Solangel Maldonado, J.D., will be joining the Center for the Study of Law and Culture on Sabbatical Fellowship for the 2015-2016 academic year.  Her work with the Center includes a project that examines how the law influences who we desire and choose as intimate partners and explores the economic, social, and political implications of these choices.  The central claim of which is that romantic preferences, as shaped by law, perpetuate segregation by limiting, on the basis of race, individuals’ prospects for marriage, economic and social mobility, and acceptance into society as full citizens.

Solangel Maldonado is the Joseph M. Lynch Professor of Law and a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia Law School. Her research and teaching interests include family law, feminist legal theory, race and the law, and international and comparative family law. Over the past decade, her scholarship has focused on the intersection of race and family law and the law’s influence on social norms of post-separation parenthood. She is currently working on a book that examines how the law shapes romantic preferences and how these preferences perpetuate racial hierarchy and economic and social inequality.

Professor Maldonado is one of the reporters of the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Children and the Law (in progress) and a co-editor of Family Law in the World Community (Carolina Academic Press, 3rd ed. 2015) (with D. Marianne Blair, Merle H. Weiner, and Barbara Stark). She also serves on the editorial board of the Family Court Review.

Prior to joining the Seton Hall faculty, Professor Maldonado was a litigation associate with Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Handler, LLP and with Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood in New York. She also clerked for then District Court Judge Joseph A. Greenaway, Jr., now on the United States Court of Appeals. She received her B.A. from Columbia College and her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and the Managing Editor of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law.