Mathilde Cohen

George Williamson Crawford Professor of Law

Education/Professional Certification

LLM & JSD, Columbia University School of Law
BA & MA, Sorbonne-École Normale Supérieure

Expertise

Animal Law, Comparative and European Law, Constitutional Law, Courts, Food Law and Policy Health, Law Jurisprudence, Law and Gender, Law and Race

Biography

Mathilde Cohen works in the fields of constitutional law, comparative law, food law, and race, gender and the law. Her work is cross-disciplinary, spanning a variety of subjects, including deliberative democracy, judicial decision-making, and the gendering and racialization of food and body fluids.

Much of Professor Cohen’s published work has focused on various modes of disenfranchisement in French and U.S. legal cultures. She has written on whether and how public institutions give reasons for their decisions and are more or less representative of the public they serve. She is currently studying the way in which bodies coded as female are alternatively empowered and disempowered by the valuable materials they make and consume, in particular human milk and placentas. In 2015, she received the Hessel Yntema Prize from the American Society of Comparative Law for the “most outstanding” article by a scholar under 40 appearing in the previous year’s volume of the American Journal of Comparative Law. During the 2020-21 academic year, Professor Cohen served as a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at Princeton University.

A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne in Paris, where she received undergraduate and graduate degrees in law and philosophy, Professor Cohen earned her LL.M. and J.S.D. as a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia Law School. While at Columbia, she was named a James Kent Scholar and served as the head articles editor for the Columbia Journal of European Law. Before joining the UConn faculty in 2012, Professor Cohen was an associate-in-law at Columbia Law and a research fellow at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.