Sarah Abramowicz
Assistant Professor of Law
Office: Room 3249
Telephone:  (313) 577-3348
E-mail: sabramowicz@wayne.edu

EDUCATION:
B.A., Stanford University
J.D., Columbia Law School
Ph.D., Columbia University

COURSES:
Family Law
Contracts
Law and Literature

PROFILE:
Sarah Abramowicz joined the faculty in Fall 2007 as an assistant professor of law. Her scholarship focuses on the history of child custody law and of legal adoption in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, and on the historical genesis of the troubled intersection between family law and contract. She is currently at work on a book, tentatively titled The Impossible Contract: Law, Parentage, and the Victorian Novel, that examines the connections between Victorian child custody law, the Victorian novel, and the rise of freedom of contract.

Prior to coming to Wayne State University Law School, Abramowicz earned her Ph.D. in English Literature at Columbia University, where she was awarded a Marjorie Hope Nicolson Fellowship and a Mellon Fellowship for Research in the Humanities in Original Sources.

Abramowicz received her B.A., with honors, from Stanford University. She received her J.D., from Columbia Law School, where she was a Kent Scholar and Review & Essays Editor of the Columbia Law Review. 

After receiving her J.D., Abramowicz was appointed to a one-year term as a Fellow in the Program on Careers in Law Teaching at Columbia Law School. She then served as a law clerk to the Hon. Amalya L. Kearse of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

PUBLICATIONS AND CONFERENCE PAPERS:

“Childhood and the Limits of Contract,” Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., March 2007.

“The Impossible Contract: Adoption and the Limits of Contract in Dickens’s Great Expectations,” Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities, University of Texas, Austin, TX, March 2005.

“From Lawyer to Detective in the Victorian Novel,” Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities, Cardozo School of Law, New York, NY, March 2003.

“Unexpected Expectations in Victorian Child Custody Law and the Victorian Bildungsroman,” Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, March 2003.

The Rights of Pretrial Detainees, in The Jailhouse Lawyer’s Manual ch. 28 (5th ed. Supp. 2002) (publication of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review).

Note, English Child Custody Law, 1660-1839: The Origins of Judicial Intervention in Paternal Custody, 99 Colum. L. Rev. 1344 (1999).