Dr. Dorothy Roberts

Dr. Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology and the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also founded and serves as director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. She is the author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, published by Pantheon in 1997; Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, published by Basic Civitas Books in 2002; Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, published by The New Press in 2011; and Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, published by Basic Books in 2022.

Her academic training was at Yale College and Harvard Law School. She practiced at the public defender service of the Children's Defense Fund before her academic career. She has held faculty appointments at Rutgers University and Northwestern University before her current position at Penn. Her scholarly agenda spans family law, race and reproduction, child-welfare scholarship and abolition advocacy, and the sociology of race in science and medicine.

Her mentor focus is the long-arc academic-book career. The structural decisions about which book-length projects to undertake. The relationship between law-school faculty position and interdisciplinary academic publishing. The slow accumulation of a body of work that holds up across multiple disciplinary conversations and across decades.

Her secondary mentor focus is family-law and child-welfare scholarship and the policy translation that follows. The work of academic-scholarship-to-policy bridge in fields where the policy stakes are immediate and the academic-scholarship pace is necessarily slower. The child-welfare abolition conversation specifically, where her work has been field-defining and increasingly cited in movement-organization and policy-advocacy spaces.

Mentees who book with Dorothy come from three primary populations. First: law-school faculty and doctoral students in law, sociology, and interdisciplinary programs working at the intersection of family law, race and reproduction, and child-welfare scholarship. Second: senior policy professionals at family-defense and child-welfare-reform organizations. Third: scholars considering the academic-book pathway for long-term research agendas.

Her style is rigorous. She comes prepared with the mentee's CV, current draft material, and brings her long-arc perspective on academic-book work, policy-translation, and the specific structural conditions in family-law and child-welfare scholarship.

Outside the Penn position she serves on advisory boards across family-defense and child-welfare-reform organizations, is a frequent expert witness in child-welfare and family-law litigation, and contributes to academic and trade publications across her field.

She is a member of the Academia and Research network here as a senior member of the law and social-sciences subgroup, a founding member of the Reproductive Justice Network alongside Loretta Ross, and the co-host of the Reproductive Justice Roundtable event series through the platform's events program.

Sessions are 60 minutes. The pre-session brief is a CV, current writing sample (no more than thirty pages), and a one-page document on the specific question. She reads the writing before the session. The session structure is loose; she works the specific material. Mentees leave with detailed written notes and a specific action list. Follow-up sessions are common.

Her work on Killing the Black Body has had a long-arc afterlife since publication in 1997. The book remains in print and continues to be cited in academic, policy, and advocacy contexts. The work consolidated a body of research on race and reproduction that has shaped subsequent scholarship across legal studies, sociology, and adjacent fields.

The Torn Apart book represents her continued engagement with the family-policing question. The argument extends Shattered Bonds and incorporates more recent scholarship and advocacy work on family-defense and family-policing abolition. The book has been adopted across legal-education contexts and across movement-organization training programs.

Her Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society work represents an institutional investment in interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of race, science, medicine, and policy. The program has hosted fellowships, conferences, and adjacent academic-infrastructure work. Mentees considering interdisciplinary-program-building work find this experience particularly useful.

Her expert-witness practice across family-law and child-welfare litigation has shaped her academic work and has shaped the legal advocacy directly. The two practices inform each other in ways she discusses with mentees considering similar combined practices.

Her current scholarly agenda continues to develop the child-welfare-abolition framing alongside adjacent work on reproductive rights and on the broader race-and-science questions her career has engaged. The long-arc perspective is one of the central values she brings to mentor sessions.

Her engagement in the platform's Academia and Research network as a senior member of the law-and-social-sciences subgroup, and as a founding contributor to the Reproductive Justice Network alongside Loretta Ross, is central to the framework conversations and academic-career conversations the platform supports. Her contributions to discussion threads on the topics of family-law scholarship, child-welfare-system abolition, and the academic-book-to-policy-translation pathway are specifically engaged and have informed broader community thinking.

The academic-research landscape continues to evolve in ways that affect Black and African women scholars specifically. The tenure-and-promotion structural conditions, the publication-venue politics, the funding landscape, and the institutional-service expectations all contribute to the long-arc career-trajectory questions that mentees bring to the mentor practice. The mentor practice connects specifically to the senior-level career-progression questions and to the long-arc structural conditions of the academic profession.

Her perspective on the broader political and policy landscape for family law, child-welfare scholarship, and reproductive-rights advocacy is informed by her sustained engagement with movement organizations, legal-academic colleagues, and policy actors across her career. Her view on the institutional infrastructure that has emerged around child-welfare-system abolition specifically is one of the central reference points for that growing movement.

Her teaching at Penn across multiple decades has produced former students who are now senior practitioners and scholars in family law, civil rights, and adjacent fields. The teaching practice is part of the broader institutional investment that has shaped legal-academic work in her fields. Sessions are 60 minutes; the pre-session brief is a CV, current writing or policy document (no more than thirty pages), and a one-page document on the specific question.

The mentor practice on this platform is part of a broader commitment to structured, professional mentorship for African and African-diaspora women across the long arc of their careers. The platform's session-management infrastructure — booking, calendaring, payment (where applicable), pre-session briefs, in-session notes, and post-session follow-up — is designed to support sustained mentor-mentee relationships across multiple sessions for mentees who benefit from that continuity. Mentees are welcome to book initial single sessions, structured multi-session engagements, or ongoing relationships across longer career arcs. The structure follows the work.