Deborah Widiss

Deborah Widiss is an associate professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law. Her research focuses on employment law, family law, the legislative process, and the significance of gender and gender stereotypes in the development of law and government policy. Her work has appeared in leading law reviews, including the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Texas Law Review, the Washington University Law Review, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender. In 2009 she was a winner of the Association of American Law Schools' annual scholarly papers competition, which recognizes excellent scholarship by junior faculty; in 2008 she was honored with a Dukeminier Award, from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, which recognizes the best sexual orientation and gender identity law scholarship published in the previous year. In 2013 she was presented with the Indiana University Trustees' Teaching Award.

Professor Widiss joined the IU Maurer School of Law faculty in 2009, after two years as a visiting assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School. Before beginning to teach, Professor Widiss was a staff attorney at Legal Momentum (formerly NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund), where she was a national expert on the intersection between domestic violence and employment. In this capacity she drafted federal and state legislation, consulted regularly with employers, and litigated cases on behalf of individual victims of domestic violence. She also authored several amicus briefs in support of marriage rights for same-sex couples. Earlier in her career Widiss worked for the Campaign for Fiscal Equity on reform of the financing of public schools, and for Lawyers Alliance for New York. She clerked for Judge Allyne R. Ross of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Widiss has a J.D. and a B.A. from Yale University.