MacKinnon, Catharine A(lice) (1946– )

US legal scholar. Even before graduating from law school, she had begun to focus on women's social and legal inequality; expanding a student paper, she published a landmark study, Sexual Harassment of Working Women: A Case of Sex Discrimination (1979), arguing that sexual harassment in the workplace constitutes a violation of civil rights statutes; her ideas became the law of the land in a 1986 Supreme Court ruling. More controversially, she also argued that pornography should be recognized as another form of sex discrimination; she and Andrea Dworkin, a prominent feminist writer, conceived and drafted an ordinance that would allow women who can prove they are harmed by pornography to sue pornographers. Concentrating on women's experience of sex inequality, she also addressed other gender-related issues, including rape and abortion.

MacKinnon was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She graduated from Smith College in 1969 and Yale Law School in 1977, later studying for a graduate degree in political science at Yale University in 1987. Her views, cogently and forcefully expressed in articles and lectures – some of them gathered in Femininism Unmodified (1987) – have gained her the reputation of being both iconoclastic and ‘the central figure in feminist legal thought’. Throughout these years of public engagement (1977–89), she practised law and taught at seven prestigious law schools before accepting a tenured post at the University of Michigan Law School (from 1989).