Meredith Render writes and teaches in the areas of property, civil rights, constitutional law, and gender and the law. Professor Render’s scholarship is focused on three areas: property theory, constitutional theory, and feminist legal theory. Her work in property is focused on theoretical questions about the concept of property itself, as well as how the concept of property might apply to the human body. Her work in constitutional theory and civil rights addresses questions of the state’s obligation to be faithful to its constitutional promises, particularly in the context of anticorruption and due process. Her work in feminist theory and gender law is focused on the concept of gender as a mediator of power.
Professor Render’s recent article, “Waste, Property, and Useless Things,” is forthcoming in Volume 138 of the Harvard Law Review. The article examines the role of a Lockean anti-waste principle in the context of planned obsolescence. Her article, “Fiduciary Injury and Citizen Enforcement of the Emoluments Clause” in the Notre Dame Law Review examines the state’s fiduciary and anti-corruption obligations in the constitutional context. Another recent piece, “Blake v. Stradford,” in Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Property Opinions (Cambridge University Press, Eloisa Rodriguez-Dod and Elena Maria Marty-Nelson ed., 2021) engages in a reimagining of a classic property case through a feminist lens, as part of Cambridge University Press’s celebrated series, Feminist Judgments. Her feminist theory piece “Gender Rules,” which considers the mechanism of gender and gender expression as a vehicle for the exercise of private power dynamics, was selected through a blind-selection process for presentation at Yale Law School as part of the Yale/Stanford Junior Faculty Forum.
Prior to joining the Alabama faculty, Professor Render was a Grey Fellow at Stanford Law School and a visiting assistant professor at the University of Maryland. Professor Render also clerked for the Honorable Fortunato Benavides of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for the Honorable George W. Lindberg of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
Some of Professor Render’s work can be found at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=686005