We’re very pleased to welcome Professor Leigh Goodmark to Skylark on Tuesday, April 23, to discuss her important book, Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism. The book is a profound and compelling argument for abolition feminism—to protect criminalized survivors of gender-based violence, we must dismantle the carceral system.
Since the 1970s, anti-violence advocates have worked to make the legal system more responsive to gender-based violence. But greater state intervention in cases of intimate partner violence, rape, sexual assault, and trafficking has led to the arrest, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration of victims, particularly women of color and trans and gender-nonconforming people. Imperfect Victims argues that only dismantling the system will bring that punishment to an end.
Leigh Goodmark (she/hers) is the Marjorie Cook Professor of Law and director of the Clinical Law Program at the University of Maryland Frances King Carey School of Law, where she teaches the Gender, Prison, and Trauma Clinic. She is the author of Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism (University of California Press 2023); Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to Intimate Partner Violence (University of California Press 2018) and A Troubled Marriage: Domestic Violence and the Legal System (New York University 2012). She is the co-editor of The Criminalization of Violence Against Women: Comparative Perspectives (Oxford 2023) and Comparative Perspectives on Gender Violence: Lessons from Efforts Worldwide (Oxford 2015).
Professor Goodmark’s work on intimate partner violence has appeared in numerous journals, law reviews, and publications, including Violence Against Women, the New York Times, the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, the Harvard Journal on Gender and the Law, and the Yale Journal on Law and Feminism. From 2003 to 2014, Professor Goodmark was on the faculty at the University of Baltimore School of Law, where she served as Director of Clinical Education and Co-director of the Center on Applied Feminism. From 2000 to 2003, Professor Goodmark was the Director of the Children and Domestic Violence Project at the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law. Before joining the Center on Children and the Law, Professor Goodmark represented clients in the District of Columbia in custody, visitation, child support, restraining order, and other civil matters. Professor Goodmark is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Law School.
