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Maryland Carey Law Professor Martha Ertman has been awarded a Fulbright Canada Traditional Scholar Award for the spring 2024 semester. Her project on contract-based reparations for racial injustice will take her to McGill University in Montreal to teach and conduct research.
Deeply affected by the racial injustice that rose in awareness during the COVID-19 pandemic, Ertman’s Fulbright project developed around a resolution to focus her work in contracts and commercial law to address this issue.
“I am not an expert in criminal defense or other areas that have traditionally been part of this conversation,” said Ertman, “but I view it as an ethical imperative to use the tools in my reach to be part of reparative efforts."
So began Ertman’s long-term project to develop a new, contract-based way to approach the idea of reparations for past racial injustice. Contracts that have been historically discriminatory, she reasoned, could instead be designed to right past and current wrongs.
In 2022, she published “Reparations for Racial Wealth Disparities as Remedy for Social Contract Breach,” in Duke Law’s Law and Contemporary Problems. The article explores the feasibility of a restitution-based remedy for wealth disparities, which she argues are caused by discriminatory debt-based government policies, in the medical debt context.
Ertman also created a new seminar, taught at Maryland Carey Law for the first time in spring 2023. The course gives students historical context and evidence that justifies reparative remedies for racial injustice, as well as the forms that reparation has taken in various contexts, barriers to implementation, and possible reparative programs for the future.
At McGill, she will teach Foundational Transactional Skills, a course on how to read and write debt contracts. The class, she says, “pairs nicely with the reparations research because reparations necessarily involve repayment of a long-overdue debt.” Her research will build on the Duke article and involve the study of Canada’s innovative approaches to reparations for injustices against Indigenous peoples.
Ertman expects output from the Fulbright project to include a law review article and, in time, a book designed for use by lawyers and activists. She also hopes to collaborate with Canadian scholars.
Ertman is the Carole & Hanan Sibel Research Professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. Over the past 30 years, she has written four books, 15 law review articles, and many other book chapters, essays, reviews, and op-eds. Those include her 2005 book Rethinking Commodification (NYU Press, ed. with Joan Williams); Developing Professional Skills: Secured Transactions (2018), the course books for 1L Contracts classes and for the Foundational Professional Skills course; and her 2015 book Love’s Promises: How Contracts and Deals Shape All Kinds of Families (Beacon Press), which translates her academic writing about contracts and not-legally-binding “deals” in reproductive technology, adoption, cohabitation, and marriage for readers outside of law schools.
Before joining the Maryland Carey Law faculty in 2007, she taught at the University of Utah and University of Denver law schools. She has also been a visiting faculty member at the universities of Michigan, Connecticut, and Oregon. Prior to entering academia, she clerked for the Honorable Peter H. Beer, a U.S. district court judge in Louisiana, and practiced law at Davis, Wright Tremaine in Seattle.
Ertman is a member of the American Law Institute.