Bio
I am the Eleanor Bontecou Professor of Law at Seton Hall University School of Law, the first tenured law professor of Dominican descent in the U.S., and the first Latina/o reporter for a Restatement of the Law project. My full bio is below.
Professor Maldonado writes and teaches in the areas of family law, gender, race, and their intersections. She is an Associate Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Children and the Law, and author of The Architecture of Desire: How the Law Shapes Interracial Intimacy and Perpetuates Inequality (NYU Press, 2024). She is the co-editor of two casebooks—Family Law: Cases and Materials (Foundation Press, 7th ed. 2019) and Family Law in the World Community (Carolina Academic Press, 3rd ed. 2015). She serves on the editorial board of the American Bar Association’s Family Law Quarterly and as Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees of the New Jersey Law and Education Empowerment Project (NJ LEEP), a pipeline and college access program for middle and high school students from underserved communities.
Prior to joining legal academia, Maldonado was a litigation associate with Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Handler, LLP and with Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood. She also clerked for District Court Judge Joseph A. Greenaway, Jr. She received her B.A. from Columbia College and her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and Managing Editor of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law. She has taught at Cardozo Law School, the University of Illinois College of Law, and Columbia Law School, where she was a visiting scholar in the Center for the Study of Law and Culture.
