Joan Heifetz Hollinger is the John and Elizabeth Boalt Lecturer in Residence at the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law. She is a scholar of adoption law, including the Indian Child Welfare Act, and of psychosocial aspects of adoptive family relationships. She is an advocate of adoption law reform and has served on […]

Naomi R. Cahn is a professor at George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C., where she has taught family law, trusts and estates. She is an expert on adoption law. She co-edited (with Joan Heifetz Hollinger) Families by Law: An Adoption Reader.

Elizabeth Bartholet is a law professor at Harvard University and faculty director of the school’s Child Advocacy Program, which she founded in the fall of 2004. She has taught civil rights and family law, specializing in child welfare, adoption and reproductive technology. She wrote Family Bonds: Adoption and the Politics of Parenting.

Dorothy E. 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 Law School.

Sandra Patton-Imani, an adoptee, is an associate professor of American studies in the Department for the Study of Culture and Society at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. She is the author of Birth Marks: Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America, in which black and multiracial adoptees discuss their experiences.

Rachel Wegner is the president of Ethica, an adoption advocacy organization that works for ethical adoption practices internationally.

Trish Maskew teaches adoption law, policy and practice at American University Washington College of Law. She founded Ethica, an adoption advocacy organization that works for ethical adoption practices internationally. She wrote Our Own: Adopting and Parenting the Older Child.

Randall L. Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He wrote Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption, an examination of the role of race in those arenas.

Heather Jacobson is assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her interests include sociology of families, the intersection of social inequality (race, class, gender) and families and family formation.