Catherine J. Ross specializes in constitutional law (with particular emphasis on the First Amendment), family law, and legal and policy issues concerning children. Her most recent book, Lessons in Censorship: How Schools and Courts Subvert Students’ First Amendment Rights (Harvard University Press, 2015) was named the Best Book on the First Amendment of 2015 by Concurring Opinions’ First Amendment News. She is currently working on a book on lies and the First Amendment. Professor Ross has been a co-author of Contemporary Family Law (Thomson/West 4th ed. 2015) since the First Edition.
Professor Ross was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 2008-2009. In 2015-2016, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard School of Education. Professor Ross has taught as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Boston College (where she held joint appointments in the School of Education and the History Department) and St. John’s School of Law in New York.
An elected Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, Professor Ross is former chair of the ABA’s Steering Committee on the Unmet Legal Needs of Children, former chair of the Section on Law and Communitarianism of the Association of American Law Schools, and has served on a wide variety of ABA committees. Prior to entering legal academia, Professor Ross was a litigator at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York, where she won major impact litigation on behalf of the city’s homeless population. Before attending Yale Law School, Professor Ross, who earned a Ph.D. in History from Yale, was on the faculty of the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center, and the Bush Center on Child Development and Social Policy at Yale with a joint appointment in History.