Professor Baker received her law degree (with honors) from the University of Chicago Law School, where she was a comments editor for the University of Chicago Law Review. She received her bachelor's degree in social studies (magna cum laude) from Harvard-Radcliffe College. After graduating from law school, Professor Baker clerked for the Honorable Edward R. Becker of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, and from 1990 to 1993, she was a trial attorney with the Environmental Enforcement Section of the United States Department of Justice. Most of Professor Baker's work focuses on issues pertaining to women. She has written extensively about sexual violence, in particular about the legal and social understandings of rape and sex. In recent years, she has focused more on family law issues, writing numerous articles on the interrelationships between legal, cultural and biological constructions of parenthood, marriage and family. Professor Baker has taught courses in Environmental Law, Evidence, Property, Family Law, Gender, Sexual Orientation and Domestic Violence. From 2001 to 2009, she was the Associate Dean for Faculty Development. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Yale Law School and Northwestern Law School.
Articles
Marriage and Parenthood as Status and Rights: The Growing, Problematic and Possibly Constitutional Trend to Disaggregate Family Status from Family Rights, Ohio State Law Journal (2010)
Bionormativity and the Construction of Parenthood, Georgia Law Review (2008)
This piece explores the relationship between legal and biological parenthood. It examines how neither history,...
The Problem with Unpaid Work, St. Thomas Law Review (2007)
This article examines the problems with a social norm that assumes women should shoulder a...
Supporting Children, Balancing Lives, Pepperdine Law Review (2007)
This paper examines how U.S. child support policy validates traditional divisions of labor and thereby...
Books
Contributions to Books
Caban v. Mohammed, 441 U.S. 380 (1979), Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court of the United States (2008)
Michael H. v. Gerald D., 491 U.S. 110, Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court of the United States (2008)
Asymmetric Parenthood, Reconceiving the Family: Critique on the American Law Institute's Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution (2006)
This analysis of the American Law Institute's Principles of Family Law, Chapter 3, examines how...