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 an early leader in establishing that violence against women is a public harm, and in the legal defense of battered women who kill in self-defense.

Education

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 "one of the architects of the civil rights movement in American law", the late United States District Judge Constance Baker Motley of the Southern District of New York.

Career

In 1971, Schneider began a summer student internship at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a non-profit legal advocacy organization dedicated to supporting activism in civil rights and social justice, co-founded by controversial and high-profile civil rights lawyer, William Kunstler, and considered the "leading gathering place for radical lawyers in the country". Upon graduating from law school in 1973, Schneider joined CCR as a full-time staff attorney. At the time, women represented 3% of U.S. lawyers admitted to practice. In 1976, in an appeal filed at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by Kuntsler and Schneider, a reversal of H. Rap Brown's 1968 federal firearms conviction was secured, when evidence was presented that the trial judge had stated to members of the Louisiana State Bar Association that he was going to "get that nigger".

While at CCR, Schneider did pioneering work in the legal defense of battered women who kill in self-defense, and in establishing that domestic violence is a public harm. She was a co-counsel on the all-female team of lawyers in the successful appeal of State of Washington v. Wanrow, one of the first women's self-defense cases. In 1977, the Washington State Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in overturning the 1973 murder conviction of Yvonne Wanrow. According to Schneider, speaking at the time, the decision was the first to deal with the legal precedent for self-defense: "It highlights the need for broader standards of self-defense—not a separate standard for women only, but equal application of the law to women." The analysis and strategies emerging from the case became the framework of many future battered women's defenses involving self-defense.

In 1983, Schneider joined the faculty of Brooklyn Law School, where she is the Rose L. Hoffer Professor of Law. She has been a visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School and Columbia Law School.

Over her career, Schneider advocated in the media for women's rights. In 1989, the governors of two states commuted the sentences of three women who had killed their male partners. Schneider commented that their actions showed a new understanding of the law. Courts were beginning to consider a decade of research into battered woman syndrome. Schneider noted that women on trial for killing or assaulting abusive husbands had begun to plead self-defense; formerly, that plea was used only when the husband was attempting murder at the moment he was killed.

Schneider 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. She has authored three books on domestic violence and women and the law.

Books

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. A Columbia Journal of Gender & Law review described it as an "outstanding critical overview of the history of the battered women’s movement and the complex legal and social issues facing battered women... [adopting] a feminist theoretical approach, which links theory with practice, to analyze the legal and social responses to domestic violence over the last two decades," emphasizing that "domestic violence is not an isolated problem, but, rather, is embedded in gender inequality that permeates our society."

Schneider is the co-editor of Women and the Law Stories (Foundation Press, 2011; with Stephanie M. Wildman), discusses landmark cases in establishing women’s legal rights, examining litigants, history, parties, strategies, and theoretical implications. Subject areas covered include history, constitutional law, reproductive freedom, the workplace, the family, and women in the legal profession, domestic violence, and rape.

Schneider is a 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).

Personal life

Schneider has two children. She was divorced in 1986. In 2017, she placed a personal ad in the Yale Alumni Magazine. Benjamin Liptzin, a retired retired geriatric psychiatrist and professor emeritus of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine, replied. The couple were married in 2020, via Zoom.