Lisa Washington is the recipient of a 2024 Dukeminier Award for her essay “Weaponizing Fear,” published in The Yale Law Journal Forum. The Williams Institute’s Dukeminier Awards acknowledge the best law review articles concerning sexual orientation and gender identity each year. Recipients of the Dukeminier Award have their articles republished in the Dukeminier Awards Journal.
Washington’s essay received The Ezekiel Webber Prize. Her essay situates Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s directive to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate and report parents who supported what he called “abusive sex change procedures” within a broader project of disciplining marginalized families. The essay “explores how fear is regularly weaponized against families with intersectional marginalized identities, and it identifies the targeting of LGBTQ+ youth and parents as a racialized movement to maintain the status quo,” Washington explained.
According to Washington, popular conversations and legal scholarship rarely adopt an intersectional lens and bigger-picture framing that includes both Black LGBTQ+ children and Black LGBTQ+ parents.
“My essay calls for scholars to foreground intersectional perspectives in the fight against anti-LGBTQ+ policies and the family regulation system more broadly,” she said.
Articles selected for a Dukeminier Award are provocative, interesting, cutting edge and supported by careful research and elegant writing. It’s no surprise Washington’s scholarship was selected, said Susannah Camic Tahk, associate dean for research and faculty development at the Law School.
“Lisa is an extraordinary scholar and a star in her field,” said Tahk. “She’s working within Wisconsin’s Law-in-Action tradition to identify and analyze urgent sociolegal problems with blazing insight, superlative intellectual rigor and bracing moral clarity.”
Washington, a former Hastie Fellow who returned to University of Wisconsin Law School last fall as assistant professor, said it’s an honor to be selected.
About Lisa Washington
Lisa Washington is particularly interested in overlapping issues of poverty, race and gender in the carceral state. Her research focuses on the intersections of family regulation law, the criminal legal system and the immigration system. Her most recent scholarship is published in the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Boston University Law Review, the Chicago Law Review Online and the Yale Law Journal Forum.
Washington received her first law degree from Humboldt University in Berlin. She then attended Columbia Law School, where she earned an LL.M. degree. She is a former Hastie Fellow. She has a background in comparative legal studies and completed her Ph.D. studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany. She grew up in both Germany and the United States and is bilingual.
Submitted by Law School News on November 7, 2024
This article appears in the categories: Faculty, Features
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