Lisa A. Crooms

A member of the Feminist Studies editorial collective since Fall 2003, Lisa A. Crooms is Director of the LL.M. Graduate Studies and teaches Contracts, Constitutional Law, and Gender and Law. In the spring of 1999, she also served as an adjunct at the American University Washington College of Law where she taught Gender, Cultural Difference and International Human Rights. Professor Crooms received her B.A. in Economics from Howard University in 1984 and her J.D. from the University of Michigan in 1991.

A human rights activist since 1984, Professor Crooms has worked with the Washington Office on Africa and the American Committee on Africa. She is currently the vice chair of the Advisory Committee of the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, for which she helped document state responses to domestic violence and rape in South Africa. She also serves on the advisory committees for the Georgetown Journal of Gender and Law, and BLACK FEMINISM (a Film Two Production). Professor Crooms has advised The Urban Justice Center’s Human Rights Project, Unifem’s paper on gender integration at the World Conference on Racism and the Women’s Institute for Leadership Development for Human Rights. In 1998, she received the United Nations Association of the National Capital Area’s Human Rights Community Award and delivered the Anna M. Hirsch Lecture on Women and the Law at the New England School of Law.

Professor Crooms’ research and activist interests include identity and rights under international human rights law, economic justice, poverty and violence. Most recently, she published "The Violence of Gender and the Gender of Violence: Law, Gender and Violence" in For the Common Good: A Critical Examination of Law and Social Control (2001), "The Mythical, Magical 'Underclass': Constructing Poverty in Race and Gender, Making the Public Private and the Private Public," 5 Iowa Journal of Gender, Race & Justice 101 (2001), and "Intersectionality, Human Rights, and De-Marginalizing Black Women in Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Human Rights," in the Americas: A New Paradigm for Activism 77 (Celina Romany ed. 2001). She both coordinated and contributed to the Symposium on the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination published in 1997 as 40:3 Howard Law Journal. In addition, she has participated in international human rights consultations in the United States, United Kingdom, Malaysia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. She has also conducted training workshops on a wide range of subjects including economic justice, gender bias in the workplace, intersectional identity in human rights law, and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Finally, between 1998 and 2000, Professor Crooms was a founding member of the Black Radical Congress and served on the organization’s national coordinating and continuations committees.