Clare Huntington is the Joseph M. McLaughlin Professor of Law at Fordham Law School and the Nathaniel Fensterstock Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia for the fall semester 2022. A nationally recognized expert in family law and poverty law, Professor Huntington’s wide-ranging scholarship explores the institutions and empirical foundations of the legal system’s approach to relationships. Her research focuses on early childhood development as well as aging, and on the challenges facing nonmarital families because of the law’s myopic focus on marriage.
Professor Huntington’s research has appeared, or will appear, in the Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, New York University Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal, among other academic journals. Representative works include: Pragmatic Family Law, 136 Harv. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2023); Family Law for the One-Hundred-Year Life, 132 Yale L. J. (forthcoming 2023) (with Naomi Cahn & Elizabeth Scott); The Institutions of Family Law, 102 B. U. L. Rev. 393 (2022); Conceptualizing Legal Childhood in the Twenty-First Century, 118 Mich. L. Rev. 1371 (2020) (with Elizabeth Scott); The Empirical Turn in Family Law, 118 Colum. L. Rev. 227 (2018); and Post-Marital Family Law: A Legal Structure for Non-Marital Families, 67 Stan. L. Rev. 167 (2015). Professor Huntington is also the author of Failure to Flourish: How Law Undermines Family Relationships (Oxford University Press 2014) and the co-editor of Social Parenthood in Comparative Perspective (NYU Press forthcoming 2023).
Professor Huntington is an Associate Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Children and the Law. She served as Fordham Law School’s Associate Dean for Research from 2014 to 2019 and as Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives from 2021 to 2022. Professor Huntington has won numerous teaching awards, including Fordham Law’s Teacher of the Year, in 2021.
Professor Huntington served as an Attorney Advisor in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel after clerking for Justice Harry A. Blackmun and Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States, Judge Merrick B. Garland of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and Judge Denise Cote of the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York. Prior to joining Fordham in 2011, Professor Huntington was an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Law School. Professor Huntington earned her JD from Columbia Law School and her BA from Oberlin College.