Symposium in Honor of Professor Sherry Colb

Friday September 29, 2023, 8:15 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

Rutgers Law School, Newark

On Friday, September 29, 2023, the Rutgers Law School and the Cornell Law Review will co-host a symposium commemorating the life of Sherry Colb and exploring the wide impact of her scholarship. Professor Colb was a member of the Rutgers Law School faculty from 1993 to 2008 (for the first two years at Camden and then at Newark). Beloved by colleagues and students alike, she was selected as a faculty graduation speaker. After stints as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia law schools, in 2008, Professor Colb joined the Cornell Law School faculty. There too, she was beloved by colleagues and students. In 2012 she received the Anne Lukingbeal Award for outstanding commitment to the women of Cornell, and she was chosen as the faculty graduation speaker in 2015. In 2019, Professor Colb was named the inaugural C.S. Wong Professor of Law. She taught at Cornell until her death in 2022.

A prolific and wide-ranging scholar, Professor Colb wrote chiefly in the fields of evidence, criminal law, criminal procedure, mental health law, feminist jurisprudence, and animal rights. Her writing was provocative, funny, and (at times) biting. It was always thought-provoking and accessible to lay readers as well as scholarly specialists. In both her teaching and her scholarship, Professor Colb encouraged her audience to attend to the law’s moral nuances and shortcomings.

Professor Colb was the author of several books, including Beating Hearts: Abortion and Animal Rights (with Michael Dorf), Mind If I Order the Cheeseburger? And Other Questions People Ask Vegans, and When Sex Counts: Making Babies and Making Law, as well as major articles in the Stanford Law Review, Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, Connecticut Law Review, American Journal of Law and Equality, and Animal Law Review. In addition, for more than twenty years, she wrote a bi-weekly column exploring timely legal issues, first for FindLaw’s Writ and later for Justia’s Verdict.

Professor Colb attended Columbia College, where she was valedictorian, and Harvard Law School. Before joining the Rutgers Law School faculty, she clerked for Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for Justice Harry A. Blackmun of the United States Supreme Court.

The symposium will take place at Rutgers Law School in Newark. The day’s events will feature papers and discussion by three panels of distinguished faculty from Rutgers, Cornell, and around the country. The panels will focus on three areas inspired by Professor Colb’s work: criminal procedure; feminist jurisprudence; and animal rights. The papers will subsequently be published in the Cornell Law Review.

For any questions or inquiries, please contact Josh Roth, Symposium Editor, Cornell Law Review at jar555@cornell.edu.

A full schedule and list of presenters will be published in the coming weeks.