Margaret “Peg” Brinig is the quintessential interdisciplinarian, melding her expertise with law and social science in empirical studies of families, social capital, and social welfare legislation. Professor Brinig is best known for her expertise in family law. She sits on the executive council of the International Society of Family Law, and recently published Family, Law, and Community: Supporting the Covenant (University of Chicago Press, 2010), which offers a distinctive study of legal reform from the perspective of family dynamics and social policy. The book examines a range of subjects of current legal interest including cohabitation, custody, grandparent visitation, and domestic violence. She concludes that conventional legal systems and the social programs they engender ignore social capital: the trust and support given to families by a community.

At the University of Notre Dame Professor Brinig is a Fellow of the Institute for Educational Initiatives and works closely with the Institute’s Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) Program. She continues to conduct groundbreaking research with colleague Nicole Garnett on the negative impact of Catholic K-12 school closures on poor neighborhoods. Professor Brinig is also a member of the American Law Institute.