Maxine Eichner joined the faculty of the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Law in January 2003. Her teaching interests include sex equality, family law, employment and employment discrimination law, legal theory and torts. She writes on issues of liberal theory, feminist theory, market-and-family conflicts, and family relationships.
Professor Eichner attended Yale College and Yale Law School, where she was an articles editor of the Yale Law Journal. After law school, she held a Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship through Georgetown Law School, clerked for Judge Louis Oberdorfer in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, and then clerked for Judge Betty Fletcher in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She subsequently practiced civil rights, women's rights, and employment law for several years at the law firm of Patterson, Harkavy, and Lawrence in Raleigh, N.C. She then entered graduate school in the political science department at UNC, eventually earning a Ph.D. in political theory while on the law school's faculty. In the course of her Ph.D. study, she held a fellowship in public affairs at the Miller Center of the University of Virginia.
Professor Eichner is an editor of Family Law: Cases, Text, Problems (eds., Ellman, Kurtz, Weithorn, Bix, Czapansky, and Eichner, forthcoming 2010). She is also Reporter for the Uniform Law Commission's Visitation and Custody Issues Affecting Military Personnel and Their Families Committee. Her new book, The Supportive State: Families, Government, and America's Political Ideals is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2010. The book considers the role that government should play in dealing with families and the dependency issues that families face.