Contact Information
Areas of Interest
- Associate Professor of Law
Education
B.S., Bridgewater State University, 2003
J.D., Suffolk University Law School, 2007
M.A., Brandeis University, 2016
Ph.D., Brandeis University, 2020
Research Interests
- Disability Justice
- Reproductive Justice
- Family Law
- Public Health Law
- Health Justice
About
Professor Robyn M. Powell joined the OU Law faculty in 2022, where she teaches courses on Family Law, Disability Law, Professional Responsibility, and Public Health Law. Previously, she was the Bruce R. Jacob Visiting Assistant Professor at the Stetson University College of Law, where she taught Torts, Disability Law, and Public Health Law. For three years, Dr. Powell was an Instructor at Boston University School of Law, where she taught Disability Law.
As a disabled woman, Dr. Powell has dedicated her career to advancing the rights of people with disabilities. For nearly five years, Dr. Powell served as an Attorney-Advisor at the National Council on Disability (NCD), an independent federal agency that advises the President and Congress on matters concerning people with disabilities. Previously, she served as a Research Associate at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis University, Disability Rights Program Manager at the Equal Rights Center, Assistant Director for Policy and Advocacy at the Disability Policy Consortium, and Staff Attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services. While in law school, Dr. Powell interned for NCD and the Disability Law Center, the Massachusetts Protection & Advocacy agency.
Dr. Powell is one of the country’s foremost authorities on the rights of parents with disabilities. She is the principal author of NCD’s report, Rocking the Cradle: Ensuring the Rights of Parents with Disabilities and their Children. As a leading expert, Dr. Powell has been interviewed by various news outlets, including the Washington Post, N.Y. Times, NPR, BBC, ABC News, the Daily Beast, and the Associated Press. In May 2016, she was an invited speaker at the White House Forum on Civil Rights of Parents with Disabilities.
Dr. Powell’s scholarship focuses on the intersection of disability law and family law, reproductive justice, and public health law, with a particular emphasis on examining how laws and policies affect disabled people’s decision-making about whether and when to have children. Her legal and social science scholarship is widely cited and well-known for providing leading, insightful, and reflective analysis of issues related to people with disabilities. Dr. Powell’s work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Michigan Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Washington Law Review, Tulane Law Review, Harvard Law Review Blog, Virginia Law Review Online, Yale Law & Policy Review, Stanford Law & Policy Review, Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, among others. She also has been published in leading peer-reviewed social science journals.