Professor Named Vice Chair of ABA Section on Civil Rights & Social Justice.

Wendy Mariner, Edward R. Utley Professor of Health Law, Bioethics & Human Rights and professor of law at the School of Law, was recently elected to serve as vice chair of the American Bar Association Section on Civil Rights & Social Justice.

Previously, Mariner served as chair of the health rights committee within the section, then was elected to the Section Council for six years. In that role, she was also elected secretary and served for one year.

“A key reason to be involved in the ABA is that it is the voice of the legal profession,” Mariner says. “It’s important that lawyers, including academics, participate in making sure that the voices of everyone in the profession are heard, especially now when the rule of law is threatened.”

According to the ABA website, the Civil Rights & Social Justice Section fulfills its role by “raising and addressing often complex and difficult civil rights and social justice issues in a dynamic and diverse society and ensuring that the protection of human rights remains a focus of legal and policy decisions.”

Mariner says that it was the mission of the section that drew her to work with the group. Many of the problems that the section works to address arise within health law, she says, such as access to care, how the economic and social environment affects health outcomes and opportunity, the relationship between physicians and their patients, and biomedical research. 

“One of the reasons that the section attracts people with different areas of legal expertise is that they have an opportunity to pursue questions of justice that they don’t confront in their professional lives,” Mariner says. Some of the committees under the Civil Rights & Social Justice Section touch on issues related to criminal justice, economic justice, racial discrimination, voting, free speech, Native American concerns, and rights of women. 

The ABA House of Delegates has adopted many resolutions sponsored by the section. In 2018, these included urging governments to enact legislation providing employees with guaranteed paid sick days and paid family and medical leave, supporting the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender under the Affordable Care Act, and urging governments to create legislation to prevent gender-based violence in the workplace and to provide remedies for said violence.

Mariner feels that her involvement with the section has enriched her legal scholarship. Working alongside lawyers from legal fields that are not necessarily her own, she says, has expanded her knowledge and helped her examine the issues that the section works to address from different perspectives.

“Studying health law exposes you to a wide range of constitutional, statutory, and common law issues that implicate civil rights, and therefore, even if I don’t have a particular expertise, I can appreciate the issues that are at stake,” Mariner says.