Catherine Ross is a professor at the George Washington University Law School, where she specializes in constitutional law (with particular emphasis on the First Amendment), family law, and legal and policy issues concerning children.
Her new book, Lessons in Censorship: How Schools and Courts Subvert Students' First Amendment Rights (Harvard University Press, 2015) was released in October 2015. The Fourth Edition of her family law casebook, Contemporary Family Law (Foundation Press/West) (co-authored with Douglas Abrams et al.) was also released in 2015.
Catherine is spending the 2015-2016 academic year as a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.
She was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 2008-2009. 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. She serves on the editorial board of the Family Courts Review, and is a former editorial board member of the Family Law Quarterly.
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 law school, Professor Ross was on the faculty of the Yale Child Study Center (School of Medicine), and the Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy at Yale, where she had previously been a post-doctoral fellow and research associate. She received her B.A., Ph.D. (in History) and J.D. from Yale University.