News Archive
IU McKinney Celebrates Retired Professor Jennifer Drobac
03/18/2024
Professor Jennifer Drobac retired in December 2023, concluding her 22-year career as a member of the faculty at IU McKinney. She was a Samuel R. Rosen Professor of Law.
Professor Drobac joined the law school in fall 2001. From 1992 to 2001, she practiced law in California, focusing on employment law issues and litigation. From 1997 to 2000, she served as a lecturer at Stanford Law School. Following law school, she clerked for the Honorable Barefoot Sanders, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.
With the #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns, Professor Drobac was much in demand by media members and people in politics for her expertise in sexual harassment and assault law. She spoke with over 100 local, state, and national media outlets on those topics.
” Throughout her career at IU McKinney, Professor Drobac demonstrated deep knowledge of and passion for her scholarly work and dedication to her students’ learning and success,” said IU McKinney Dean Karen E. Bravo.
Maggie McMillan, J.D. ’23, was a student in Professor Drobac’s sexual harassment law class and was one of the students who worked on the multi-disciplinary forum, “Can We Talk?” which took place in spring 2023. “My favorite part of her class was the constant emphasis on intersectionality,” McMillan said. “Women and other marginalized individuals in the workplace and in society often carry multiple levels of identity and the ways that they are impacted from discrimination affect every aspect of their lives. We didn't just study the law, we studied how society is affected by both the successful defense of those rights and how it is hurt when the law fails.” She currently works in litigation support and continues to “live out my feminist ideals as an advocate for children in foster care and students who experience gender discrimination.”
Professor Drobac’s scholarly work has been published in a variety of law reviews and journals. She is currently working on a book titled The Myth of Consent for University of Cambridge Press. This book analyzes the neuroscientific and psychosocial aspects of decision making by vulnerable adults and offers legal solutions for reform. In 2005, she finished her first textbook, Sexual Harassment Law: History, Cases and Theory. A new edition of that text was published in 2020 (with Carrie N. Baker and Rigel C. Oliveri, Carolina Academic Press). Professor Drobac has also completed a book concerning adolescent neurological and psychosocial development and the law, Sexual Exploitation of Teenagers: Adolescent Development, Discrimination, and Consent Law (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Professor Drobac engaged in her research as a visiting scholar or fellow at a number of academic institutions including: The Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Law, Brain, and Behavior; Clare Hall, University of Cambridge; and Berkeley Law, University of California, The Center for the Study of Law and Society. She became a Fulbright Specialist in 2015. She received the Indiana University 2010 Sylvia E. Bowman Distinguished Teaching Award. She also received the 2005 Indiana University Trustees' Teaching Award. She was named a John S. Grimes Fellow in 2006, 2009, 2017, and 2018, and a Dean's Fellow in recognition of scholarly excellence in 2005-2006.
