About Me

Joanna L. Grossman is the inaugural Ellen K. Solender Endowed Chair in Women and the Law at SMU Dedman School of Law in Dallas, Texas. After graduating with distinction from Stanford Law School, Professor Grossman began her career as a clerk for Ninth Circuit Judge William A. Norris. She also worked as staff counsel at the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, D.C. as a recipient of the Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellowship. In addition, she practiced law at the Washington, D.C. firm of Williams & Connolly LLP. Professor Grossman writes extensively on sex discrimination and workplace equality, with a particular focus on issues such as sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination. Her book, Nine to Five: How Gender, Sex and Sexuality Continue to Define the American Workplace (Cambridge, 2016), provides a lively and accessible discussion of contemporary cases and events that show gender continues to define the work experience in both predictable and surprising ways. She is also an expert in family law, especially parentage law and the state regulation of marriage. She is co-author (with Lawrence M. Friedman) of Inside the Castle: Law and the Family in 20th Century America (Princeton University Press, 2011), a comprehensive social history of U.S. family law.  She has authored or edited several other books, as well as dozens of scholarly articles.  She is also a regular columnist for Justia’s Verdict, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her work on parentage law.