Deborah Dinner

Deborah Dinner is a legal historian whose research examines work, gender, capitalism, and the welfare state in the twentieth-century United States. Her scholarship explores the interaction between social movements, legal and economic thought, political culture, and legal change. Her courses and curricular interests include Property, Employment Discrimination, Employment Law, Family Law, Gender & the Law, Law & Social Movements, and the Legal History of Risk.

Dinner is the author of Feminism Lost: Work, Care, and the Law, 1964-1996 (Cambridge University Press, Studies in Legal History Series, forthcoming 2026). This book analyzes legal and political debates about sex equality, from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to welfare reform legislation in 1996. Feminism Lost argues that business opposition, judicial conservatism, and the rise of the New Right narrowed feminists’ most capacious goals to expand welfare state supports for care. At the same time, litigation narrowed feminists’ interpretations of sex discrimination law, enshrining rights to formal equal treatment in the workplace without transforming labor market structures. Ultimately, these dual trends facilitated the rise of neoliberal governance in the late twentieth century, replacing Fordist conceptions of the family, workplace, and welfare with ones based on universal wage-earning, purported gender freedom, and intensified private responsibility for care.

Dinner’s published articles explore feminist legal activism respecting childcare and pregnancy discrimination, gender in public accommodations, masculinity and divorce law, and the relationship between sex discrimination law and retrenchment in labor regulation. These appear in the Yale Law Journal, Virginia Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, and Law and History Review, among other leading journals and edited volumes. She is currently working on a new book project titled A Nation at Risk: Private Insurance and the Law in Modern America. This project investigates the tension between antidiscrimination principles and actuarial logic, through the history of legal disputes about risk classification and social inequity.

Dinner earned her J.D. and Ph.D. in history from Yale. Following law school, she clerked for Judge Karen Nelson Moore of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Prior to joining the faculty at Cornell Law, she served as an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law and Emory University School of Law. She was awarded a Program in Law & Public Affairs (LAPA) Fellowship at Princeton University (2020-2021) and an American Council of Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship (Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, 2022-2023), in support of her research on the legal history of insurance.