Introduction.

• Author: Franke, Katherine M.
• Position: The Works of Martha C. Nussbaum: Feminism and Liberalism; History, Identity and Sexuality; Gender and Development

Each year, the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law devotes a daylong symposium to the significant contributions of a senior scholar to the literature of gender and/or sexuality law and theory. For our inaugural symposium we were pleased to have selected Martha Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago with joint appointments in the Philosophy Department, Law School and Divinity School. Professor Nussbaum's work spans a daunting terrain. In her work as a classicist and theorist of liberal humanism, she has both explored an ethics of vulnerability and human flourishing, in The Fragility of Goodness (1996), and defended liberal education in Cultivating Humanity (1997). In Hiding from Humanity (2004) she used tools from moral psychology to better understand the role that shame and disgust play in legal argument, focusing in particular on the subordination of women, Jews and homosexuals. Her Sex and Social Justice (1999) defended a universal notion of gendered and sexuality-based justice that demonstrates the ineluctable link between sex and social justice. Finally, in Women and Human Development (2000) and Frontier of Justice (2006) she made a compelling case for defining development goals in terms of human capabilities that insist on the priority of gender and sex-based justice.

Some scholars of great prominence make their mark by boring deep into a difficult problem, using complex theoretical tools to reveal a problem's troubled premises, illuminate its hidden biases and in so doing enhance our appreciation of the problem and the role of law in its eradication. Other distinguished scholars aim more for breadth than depth, reaching across disciplines to aid our understanding of a domain in life or in law with the tools and methodologies of an allied field, be it philosophy, political theory or economics. Still others have built remarkable bodies of work taking as their starting point not the realm of theory but the demands of real life and those who suffer unnecessarily. Their work starts with the world and works out from there to the more abstract domain of ideas. These scholars insist that our scholarly projects be motivated by and responsive to the most urgent of real world problems.

What is most remarkable about Martha Nussbaum is that she has developed a body of field-transforming scholarship not in any one of these domains, but in all of them. She is at once a scholar in the...