Mary Joe Frug

Mary Joe Frug (née Gaw; 1941 – April 4, 1991) was a professor at New England Law Boston, and a leading feminist legal scholar. She is considered a forerunner of legal postmodern feminist theory. Much of her work was collected in the posthumously-published book, Postmodern Legal Feminism. She is the author of the casebook Women and the Law.

On April 4, 1991, Frug was murdered on the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the home that she shared with her husband, Harvard Law professor Gerald Frug, and their two children. The murder remains unsolved.

Career Frug received a Bachelor of Arts from Wellesley College, a Juris Doctor from the National Law Center at George Washington University, and a Master of Laws from New York University. She worked for three years providing free legal services to low income clients in Washington, D.C. and New York. From 1975 to 1981, she was a professor at the Villanova University School of Law. In 1981, she joined the New England School of Law, where she taught until 1991. At the time of her death, she was on sabbatical, doing research as a fellow at Radcliffe College’s Bunting Institute. Fem-Crits applied the principles of CLS to feminism, to show how the law subordinates women in a male-dominated power structure. The group has been described as a foundational part of "progressive resistance to conservative legal thought" during the 1980s Reagan revolution, and a breakaway move from the "white male-dominated Conference on Critical Legal Studies."

Personal life Frug was born as Mary Joe Gaw in St. Joseph, Missouri in 1941. In 1968, she married Gerald Frug, with whom she had two children.

Murder investigation The investigation by local police was soon joined by other police departments and the FBI. Frug's purse was found at the scene, which led investigators to rule out robbery as the motive. A witness a block away described a white male, 5'10"-6'0", late teens to early 20s, brown hair, dressed in dark clothing, running from the scene. Shoe prints were found and plaster casts taken. The murder weapon, unrecovered, was determined to be a military-style knife. A knife was found near the crime scene, but forensic examination failed to connect it to the murder. There were no suspects, no leads, and no idea of motive at the time.

Frug's murder remains unsolved. In 2019, a newly-formed cold case unit in Middlesex County, Massachusetts took up the case.

Harvard Law Review controversy In March 1992, the prestigious, student-edited scholarly journal, the Harvard Law Review, published an unfinished draft article by Frug called "A Postmodern Feminist Legal Manifesto," which explored legal theories on violence toward women. Gerald Frug had submitted the article on his late wife's behalf. Some members of the Review were opposed to publishing the piece, and later parodied it in "He-Manifesto of Post-Mortem Legal Feminism", which was included in the Harvard Law Revue, an annual spoof of the Review. The essay argued that Frug's theories were the concoction of paranoid feminists. It was filled with inside jokes and sexual innuendo, suggested that Frug's husband's tenure at Harvard Law was the only reason the paper was published, and mocked her death. was in the midst of a decade-long culture war. Co-authors Craig Coben and Kenneth Fenyo apologized in a statement, particularly to Frug's husband. They added that they did not mean to distribute the article on the anniversary of her death. The statement was signed by other members of the Review, including the then-editor Paul Clement.

Legacy In 1994, the Mary Joe Frug Fund was launched to establish an endowed chair at New England Law in her memory, to allow visiting professors to come to New England Law to teach women's issues in the law. The Women's Law Caucus at New England Law established the Mary Joe Frug Grant to provide "stipends for students at New England who devote their summers to improving the lives of women."

New England Law houses the "Professor Mary Joe Frug Women and the Law Collection" at its library. A fourth edition of Frug's casebook, Women and the Law, now titled Mary Joe Frug's Women and the Law, was published in 2007.

In a commemorative piece written by colleagues following Frug's death, Gary Minda, a Cardozo Law professor, wrote: "Mary Joe inspires all of us to challenge the constraints of gender and to remain hopeful and optimistic about the possibility of coming to grips with the dilemmas of difference that separate our lives."

In 2016, the New England Law Reviews Mary Joe Frug Memorial Symposium marked the 25th anniversary of Frug's death. In her written contribution, Brooklyn Law School professor Elizabeth M. Schneider commented: "Twenty-five years after her death, I see even more of a need for the integration of Mary Joe's perspectives into ongoing work on feminist legal theory and practice. We are in the midst of a very fragmented time, where there seems to be little appreciation of, and sensitivity to, the history of feminist legal theory and practice... Mary Joe looked at feminist legal dilemmas in particular contexts; nuance was key, and her views were not totalistic. She vigorously rejected gender stereotypes, including the stereotype of victim. Constant re-thinking, not rigidity, was the name of the game. Also, flexibility over time."