Elizabeth M. Schneider

Elizabeth M. Schneider is a professor at the Brooklyn Law School, and a leading feminist scholar in the fields of gender law, domestic violence, and federal civil litigation. She was co-counsel (with and Nancy Stearns) in the successful appeal of State v. Wanrow in Washington, one of the first women's self-defense cases; the analysis and strategies emerging from the case became the underpinning for many future cases of battered women's self-defense.

Schneider is the author of Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking (Yale University Press, 2000), which won the 2000 Association of American Publishers Professional-Scholarly Publishing Award in Law. She is co-editor of Women and the Law Stories (Foundation Press, 2011; with Stephanie M. Wildman), and co-author of the casebook Domestic Violence and the Law: Theory and Practice (Foundation Press, 2013) (with Cheryl Hanna, Emily J. Sack and Judith G. Greenberg). She lectures internationally on gender and law and domestic violence. She was a consultant for the UN Secretary-General’s In-Depth Study of All Forms of Violence Against Women, presented to the United Nations General Assembly in 2006.

Schneider graduated from Bryn Mawr College cum laude with Honors in Political Science (1968), was a Leverhulme Fellow at the London School of Economics where she received an M.Sc. in Political Sociology (1969), and has a Juris Doctor from New York University School of Law, where she was an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow (1973), She clerked for the late United States District Judge Constance Baker Motley of the Southern District of New York.