Role: Assistant Professor, Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law
Dallas, Texas USA

  Contact: jdweaver@mail.smu.edu

  Research Interests:
Child Abuse and Neglect | Child Welfare Reform | Family and Race Intersectional Feminism

Jessica Dixon Weaver is an Assistant Professor at Southern Methodist University (“SMU”) Dedman School of Law in Dallas, Texas.  She teaches in the areas of family and children and the law, as well as professional responsibility. 

Before entering the academy in 2002, she had a solo law practice in the areas of child welfare, juvenile, and employment law.  Weaver was the founding director of the W.W. Caruth, Jr. Child Advocacy Clinic at SMU Dedman School of Law, where she taught an interdisciplinary course and supervised law students who served as guardians and attorneys ad Litem for abused and neglected children.  She was honored in 2009 as an Extraordinary Minority in Texas Law by the Texas Lawyer for her work with the child advocacy clinic.  In 2010, SMU received a $2.5 million grant for continuation of the child advocacy clinic and the establishment of an Institute to serve as an academic leader in the transformation of child welfare law and policy.  Weaver is the 2012 Chair of the Children and the Law Section of the American Association of Law Schools (“AALS”).

Weaver has published a range of articles and shorter works, including The African-American Child Welfare Act: A Legal Redress for African-American Disproportionality in Child Protection Cases, 10 Berkeley J. Afr.-Am. L. & Pol’y 109 (2008); The Texas Mis-Step:  Why the Largest Child Removal in Modern U.S. History Failed, 16 Wm. & Mary J. Women & L. 449 (2010); The Principle of Subsidiarity Applied:  Reforming the Legal Framework toCapture the Psychological Abuse of Children, 18 Va. J. Soc. Pol’y and Law 247 (2011);African-American Grandmothers:  Does the Gender Entrapment Theory Apply?  Essay Response to Professor Beth Richie, 37 Wash. U. J.L. & Pol’y 153 (2011); and The First Father:  Perspectives on the President’s National Fatherhood Initiative, 50 Fam. Ct. Rev. __ (2012).    She has presented her research and articles at various top U.S. law schools.  She is currently working on two articles, Grandma in the White House and Family and Race in Post-Obama America. 

While at Emory, Weaver worked with Martha Fineman, Barbara Bennett Woodhouse, and other affiliated faculty of the Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative on a research project exploring the relationship of female child sexual abuse to neglectful motherhood and termination of parental rights.  She focused on the development of an interdisciplinary theory of rehabilitation for sexually abused mothers whose children have been removed.