Faculty Profile

Deborah Widiss

Associate Professor of Law

Biography

Professor Widiss joined the Indiana Law faculty in 2009, after two years as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Brooklyn Law School. Before beginning to teach, Professor Widiss was a staff attorney at Legal Momentum (formerly NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund), where she was a national expert on the intersection between domestic violence and employment. In this capacity, she drafted federal and state legislation, consulted regularly with employers, and litigated cases on behalf of individual victims of domestic violence. Widiss also worked for the Campaign for Fiscal Equity on reform of the financing of public schools and for Lawyers Alliance for New York. She clerked for Judge Allyne R. Ross of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

Professor Widiss's research interests include employment law, family law, the legislative process, and the significance of gender and gender stereotypes in the development of law and government policy. In 2009, she was a winner of the Association of American Law Schools' annual scholarly papers competition, which recognizes excellent scholarship by junior faculty; in 2008, she was honored with a Dukeminier Award, from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, which recognizes the best sexual orientation and gender identity law scholarship published in the previous year.

Selected Works

• Shadow Precedents and the Separation of Powers: Statutory Interpretation of Congressional Overrides, 84 NOTRE DAME L. REV. 511 (2009) (lead article) (winner of the 2009 AALS Scholarly Papers competition)
• Domestic Violence and the Workplace: The Explosion of State Legislation and the Need for a Comprehensive Strategy, 35 FLA. ST. U. L. Rev. 669 (2008).
• Exposing Sex Stereotypes in Recent Same-Sex Marriage Jurisprudence, 30 HARV. J.L. & GENDER 461 (2007) (with Elizabeth N. Rosenblatt & Douglas NeJaime) (winner of a 2008 Dukeminier Award)

Related Links

• SSRN
• CV
• Publications