Lucinda M Finley
Frank G. Raichle Professor of Trial and Appellate Advocacy
and Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs
B.A., Barnard College of Columbia University, 1977
J.D., Columbia University, 1980
University at Buffalo Law School
The State University of New York
563C Capen
Hall, North Campus
Buffalo, NY 14260-1100
Phone:(716) 645-6152
Assistant:
Camille Catalano, 504 O'Brian Hall, Phone: (716) 645-2167
Biography:
Lucinda M. Finley is the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, and the Frank Raichle Professor of Law at the State University of New York at Buffalo School of Law. As Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs she oversees the promotion and tenure process, strategic faculty hiring and retention initiatives, faculty award and recognition programs, and faculty development programs. As a law professor her research and teaching areas include tort law, women and the law, reproductive rights, employment discrimination, and first amendment and equal protection law. She has also served as the Director of the law school's Concentration in Civil Litigation, Moot Court Faculty Advisor, advisor to the Buffalo Women's Law Journal, and Director of the Gender, Law and Social Policy Program of the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy.
She is an internationally recognized scholar in the fields of tort law and women and the law, and is the author of numerous law review articles and book chapters on these issues. She is also the co-author of a leading Torts casebook, Tort Law & Practice (Lexis Publ. rev. 2nd ed. 2003, 3rd ed. 2006) (with Vetri, Levine & Vogel). Her recent research focuses on tort reform caps on non-economic damages, and analyzes how caps disparately impact women, the elderly, and children. This research, which is proving quite influential in the ongoing legislative debates and litigation about tort reform, is published in the article "The Hidden Victims of Tort Reform: Women, Children and the Elderly", 53 Emory Law Journal 1263 (2004). She has written and lectured in the U.S. and internationally on women and tort law, sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination, reproductive rights, feminist jurisprudence, and gender-inclusive law school curricula.
In addition to her scholarly activities, she is active as a litigator and appellate advocate in the federal courts, and also brings her scholarship to bear on public policy issues with frequent testimony before the U.S. Congress and state legislative committees on issues ranging from tort reform and its impact on women to violence targeted at reproductive health clinics. She was the first woman lawyer from western New York to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, when in 1996 she successfully represented western New York health care clinics and the Pro-Choice Network of Western New York in Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network, an important First Amendment case involving the limits courts may place on demonstration activities by anti-abortion protestors. She also assisted the Colorado Attorney General's office with another U.S. Supreme Court First Amendment case dealing with limits on protestors at health care facilities, Hill v. Colorado; and she was part of the only father -- daughter team to appear before the nation's high court in a 1991 case involving the taxability of Title VII employment discrimination damages, U.S. v. Burke. In February 2000 she was selected as one of the ten most outstanding women in law in western New York by the women judges committee of the Eighth Judicial District and the Women's Bar Association of Western New York.
She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Barnard College and an honors graduate of Columbia University Law School, where she was Articles Editor of the Law Review. After law school she served as law clerk to Judge Arlin Adams on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and then practiced law with the Washington D.C. law firm of Shea and Gardner before becoming a law professor. Prior to joining the Buffalo law faculty, she was on the Yale Law School faculty, and she has also been a visiting professor at the University of Sydney law school in Australia and an adjunct professor at Cornell Law School. In 1999, she was the Distinguished Visiting Professor at DePaul University Law School in Chicago. During her academic career she has been awarded some prestigious research fellowships, including a Bunting Fellowship at the Bunting/Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University, and a MacArthur Foundation Women's Health Policy Fellowship at the University of Illinois at Chicago Center for Research on Women and Gender.
Selected Publications:
Books
Tort Law and Practice (with D. Vetri, L. Levine, and J. Vogel) (LexisNexis/Matthew Bender, 3rd edition, 2006)
Tort Law and Practice (with D. Vetri, L. Levine, and J. Vogel) (LexisNexis/Matthew Bender, 2nd edition, 2003)
Articles
The Hidden Victims of Tort Reform: Women, Children, and the Elderly, Emory Law Journal vol. 53: 1263-1314 (2004) (Thrower Symposium issue) [SSRN]
Putting "Protection" Back in the Equal Protection Clause: Lessons from Nineteenth Century Women's Rights Activists' Understandings of Equality, Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review vol. 13: 429-452 (2004) (Symposium on Vision and Revision: The Fourteenth Amendment)
Guarding the Gate to the Courthouse: How Trial Judges Are Using Their Evidentiary Screening Role to Remake Tort Causation Rules, Depaul Law Review vol. 49: 335-376 (1999) (Clifford Symposium) [SSRN]Female Trouble: The Implications of Tort Reform for Women, Tennessee Law Review vol. 64: 847-879 (1997)
Sex-Blind, Separate But Equal, or Anti-Subordination? The Uneasy Legacy of Plessy v. Ferguson for Sex and Gender Discrimination, Georgia State University Law Review vol. 12: 1089-1128 (1996)
Chapters
The Priceless-Worthless Dilemma: In Defense of Individualized Non-Economic Damages, Fault Lines: Tort Law and Practice (D.M. Engel & M.McCann, editors) (Stanford University Press, 2009)
The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994, Major Acts of Congress (Greenwood Publishing, 2004)
The Story of Roe v.Wade: From a Garage Sale for Women's Lib, to the Supreme Court, to Political Turmoil, Constitutional Law Stories (M. Dorf, editor) (Foundation Press, 2004)
The Pharmaceutical Industry and Women's Reproductive Health: The Perils of Ignoring Risk and Blaming Women, Corporate Victimization of Women (J. Fox & E. Szockyj, editors) (Northeastern University Press, 1996)