Ruthann Robson, Professor of Law and University Distinguished Professor, writes legal scholarship and theory, fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction.

She is the author of SAPPHO GOES TO LAW SCHOOL and LESBIAN (OUT)LAW: SURVIVAL UNDER THE RULE OF LAW, as well as the novel a/k/a and short fiction collection The Struggle for Happiness (both from St. Martin’s Press) and Cecile and Eye of a Hurricane (both from the lesbian-feminist press Firebrand Books).

An annotated bibliography of her work from 1979-2005 by Sanja Zgonjanin appeared in 8 New York City Law Review 682 - 774 (2005).

She has taught at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law since 1990 in the areas of constitutional law, family law, feminist legal theory, and sexuality and the law. The New York City Law Review has published a symposium on her work in volume 8, issue 2. In 2007, the CUNY board of Trustees designated Professor Ruthann Robson a University Distinguished Professor. A profile by Jill Jarvis is featured on the CUNY website. A profile by Emily Sachar is featured in CUNY LAW, the law school magazine.

Other recent activities include being a 2007 Fellow in Nonfiction Literature, New York Foundation for the Arts; Bram Fischer Research Chair, Witwatersrand (WITS) Law School, Johannesburg, South Africa; Collaborative Research Fellowship, University of Sydney; Djerassi Artists Fellowship Residency; and a CALI (Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction) Family Law Fellowship.

Her comments on Constitutional Law can be found at Constitutional Law Prof Blog.

Before and After Sappho:
Part 1: Logos, in Trivia: Voices of Feminism (here)
Part 2: Eudaemonia, in Law & Literature (here)
Part 3: Demokratia, in Stetson Law Review (here)

Sexual Justice, Student Scholarship, and the So-Called Seven Sins, in Law and Sexuality  (here)

A Conversation on Judicial Power and Queer Rights with Justice Michael Kirby in Suffolk University Law Review (here).

A Couple of Questions about Class Mobility, an essay in Harvard Review.

Compulsory Matrimony, in Feminism and Queer Legal Theory (here).

A Servant of One’s Own: The Continuing Class Struggle in Feminist Legal Theories and Practices, an essay-review in Berkeley Journal of Gender Law and Justice (here).

Unsettling Sexual Citizenship, an essay-review in McGill Law Journal (here).

Like Girls, fiction available from Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue.

dinner with anyone, fiction available at the “second helpings” issue of a new lesbian online magazine: read these lips.

any reason, fiction from a new journal, J Journal, a journal of justice, from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY (available here).

WATCH THIS SPOT FOR FUTURE PUBLICATIONS:

MASKS (Leapfrog Press)

Selection from Legal Studies Forum (2005)

Four poems from Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly (2002)

is national poetry month
I spend it recovering from surgery
accomplishment measured not in metaphor or meter
but in tubes removed from their beds of flesh

At the huge hospital door, I am released
a nonnative butterfly at a spring wedding
the huge world flutters gales against
what I hope will soon be scars

Home, on my porch, I try to read Cavafy,
Piercy, Rich, Rilke, or even Plath,
but the white spaces on the pages
absorb all my diluted attention

So I turn to the catalogs accumulated in my absence
the models mapped with this season’s swimsuits
look oddly unfinished-unbisected by incisions
no neat detours around the navel’s pothole

My yard seems wide as the Asian Steppes
mother of those wild tulips cultivated by the Dutch
great great grandmother to the single red cup
blooming from a bulb buried by someone I once knew

Someone who could strut, smooth-skinned, in a bikini,
someone whose wings could skirt the sun, someone
who read poems celebrating April’s cruelties, believing
herself strong enough to survive them, laughing

The Struggle for Happiness (St. Martin’s Press, 2000) (short fiction)

A/K/A (St. Martin’s Press, 1997) (novel)

Another Mother (St. Martin’s Press, 1995) (novel)

Cecile (Firebrand Books, 1991) (linked short stories)

Eye of a Hurricane (Firebrand Books, 1989) (short stories) (winner of the Ferro- Grumley Award for outstanding fiction on lesbian life)

Short Fiction

O P E N, 28 Legal Studies Forum 815-823 (2004)

Lake Hudson’s Daughter, 13 Harv. Women's L. J. 367 (1990)

From an interview at Stonewall Inn

Interview about aka

Winged Taxonomy, 1 memoir(and) 94-104 (2007)

Reblooming 2:2 bloom 55-68 (2005)

Notes from a Difficult Case, 21 Creative Nonfiction 6- 19 (2003) reprinted in Lee Gutkind, editor, In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction (W.W. Norton, 2005); reprinted in Lee Gutkind, editor, Rage and Reconcilation (SMU Press 2005)

Notes on My Dying 18 Creative Nonfiction 8-17 (2001)

Striving to be Selfish 4 Journal of Lesbian Studies 125-130 (2000).

Yet I am also persuaded by the definition of creative nonfiction advanced by Lee Gutkind, founder of the magazine CREATIVE NONFICTION, in which some of my work has appeared.

Here is Jim Elkins, describing the form in a ‘conversation’:

As we continue to talk about the mosaic/prose poem/fragment style of writing which you’ve taken up, and which I find quite attractive, I’ve decided I need to say something more about it. Herewith my-what shall we call it?-an ode: So, what is this new writing? It begins with found fragments drawn from the imagined and the real. This new writing is the well-crafted pot, made to be broken, and then recollected as shards-the writer as archaeologist. In the use of fragments we have the haiku of non fiction, a new genre of inscription. Quotation is welcome but not required. Footnotes appear but are not welcome. Meandering is forgiven. It is the stitching, coalescing, and commingling-pastiche, potpourri, medley, hodgepodge. (It is a print/old culture version of hypertext.) It is writing with a voice, an attitude, a presence of mind; it is fresh, sharp, lean and angular. In this writing with pen and scalpel, what is not said counts as well as what is said. The final product is- yes-an illusion, a sense that we have stood momentarily in the presence of mystery. The new writing is, in its poetics, poetry; it reminds us, first and last, of what a nimble mind can do.

Ruthann, as you practice this new essay writing, I find it elegant, economical, sensible, practical, crafty. It’s prose doing the work of poetry, poetry for those who don’t want to worry about the line breaks. . . .

As a concession to the labels “fiction theory” and “creative non fiction,” I suppose there is a need, at times, to find for our writing, genre labels that make it possible to redefine, imaginatively, our writings. And if in turning to these new labels we find it possible to write in ways we have not previously written, then the new labels serve a purpose. Maybe there is an inescapable need for new classifying categories, and a still greater need on the part of progressives and adventurers to seek out, put to use, and inhabit these new classificatory categories.

Footnotes: A Story of Seduction, 75 UMKC Law Review 1181-1186 (2007)

The Satisfactions of Kimberly Bascomb: An Intervention into the World of Lowell Komie’s Fictional Women Lawyers, 31 Legal Studies Forum 835-849 (2007)

O P E N, 28 Legal Studies Forum 815-823 (2004)

Notes from a Difficult Case, 21 Creative Nonfiction 6- 19 (2003) reprinted in Lee Gutkind, editor, In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction (W.W. Norton, 2005); reprinted in Lee Gutkind, editor, Rage and Reconcilation (SMU Press 2005)

Codifications: The Regulation of Lesbian Relationships, 9 The Australian Feminist Law Journal 3 - 23 (1997)

Lake Hudson’s Daughter, 13 Harv. Women's L. J. 367 (1990)

Jim Elkins, the editor of Legal Studies Forum, has a great syllabus on law and literature. Additionally he has written about my work, James Elkins, A Poetics - Of and For - Ruthann Robson, 8 N.Y. City L. Rev. 363 (2005) and we have also published a conversation about law and literature, A Conversation (with James R. Elkins), 29 Legal Studies Forum 145-171 (2005).

Other discussions of my work combining law and literature include:
Kate Nace Day, A Path to Story(s) Table, 8 N.Y. City L. Rev. 345 (2005);
Andrea McArdle, Teaching Writing in Clinical, Lawyering, and Legal Writing Courses: Negotiating Professional and Personal Voice, 12 Clinical L. Rev. 501 (2005-2006);
Lynda Hall, Ruthann Robson: Writing Life and Fiction-Theory, 8 N.Y. City L. Rev. 401 (2005).