Luther Merritt Swygert of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and was on faculty at the University of Wisconsin Law School from 1976 to 1990.
"[7] Over time, Fineman expanded the scope of the Project – increasing the number and variety of annual workshops and presentations, and adding new programs.
[9] The FLT Project hosts four or five scholarly workshops per year with a core commitment "to foster interdisciplinary examinations of specific law and policy topics of particular interest to women."
Its purpose is to provide a forum for scholars interested in engaging the concepts of "vulnerability" and "resilience" and the idea of a "responsive state" in constructing a universal approach to address the human condition.
Yet the fact that dependency is unavoidable in any society and must be dealt with to sustain the polity, Fineman contends, gives the state the responsibility to support caretaking.
The vulnerability approach is an alternative to traditional equal protection analysis; it represents a post-identity inquiry in that it is not focused only on discrimination against defined groups, but concerned with privilege and favor conferred on limited segments of the population by the state and broader society through their institutions.
[14]According to Selberg and Wegerstad, Fundamental to Fineman's scholarly work is a feminist critique of notions of equality, the liberal subject and prevailing anti-discrimination politics.
According to Fineman, the current anti-discrimination doctrine assumes that discrimination is the discoverable and correctable exception to an otherwise just and fair system, characterized by values such as individual liberty and autonomy.
"[16] Fineman is the recipient of the 2008 Cook Award from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University[17] and the 2006–2007 Leverhulme Visiting Professorship.
[21] In 2010, Fineman held a Marie Curie Fellowship at the UCD Equality Studies Center which was awarded by the European Union.
[23] Additionally, she held a Neilson Professorship at the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute at Smith College and was named a Lifetime Fellow by the American Bar Foundation.
(forthcoming 2020); "The Limits of Equality: Vulnerability and Inevitable Inequality," in FEMINIST JURISPRUDENCE, Elgar Press: Bowman, C. and West, R. Eds.