FORDHAM LAW — Award-winning author and expert Dorothy Roberts discussed her career-spanning examination of the “closely entangled” connections between the child welfare and criminal legal systems at Fordham Law School on Feb. 1. Professor Roberts was invited to the Law School to give this year’s Eunice Carter Lecture, in which she discussed her most recent book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build A Safer World (2022). Professor Roberts holds a distinguished university professorship, as well as a named chair in the Law School, along with appointments in the Africana Studies and Sociology Departments at the University of Pennsylvania. She talked about the trajectory of her life’s work, which includes research into how contemporary treatment of Black women is linked via law and policy to an earlier era of enslavement and movements to abolish those systems. Professor Roberts also explained how her work on family policing relates to police surveillance, carceral logics, and abortion bans, and reflected upon the residual effects of slavery on Black Americans’ lives today.