Professor June Carbone, Robina Chair in Law, Science, and Technology, is not a scholar who favors classic legal analyses, which go narrow and deep. She prefers to go broad and synthesize, taking an interdisciplinary approach that engages students, tracks society’s shifting norms, and resonates with the real world. Throughout her career, she has focused on the intersections of law and economics, law and science, and law and society.
Carbone’s work not only attracts national media attention but is also known internationally, says Professor Naomi Cahn, a longtime collaborator who currently directs the Family Law Center at the University of Virginia. “She’s incredibly creative and one of the smartest people I know. She asks really good questions, and she keeps going until she gets an answer,” Cahn says. She and Carbone, along with others, have co-authored several books, the most recent of which is Fair Shake: Women & the Fight to Build a Just Economy (Simon & Schuster, 2024), with University of Missouri-Kansas City law professor Nancy Levit. Salon magazine named it one of 2024’s five most thought-provoking books.
Carbone has always focused on women and family issues as they relate to fairness and equality, from reproductive rights to equal pay. Recently, however, she has begun looking beyond traditional gender discrimination issues. “What my scholarship does is try to position the evolution of law within the context of certain economic and political currents,” she says. “Our legal conclusion is that the more important causes of action today are not about equality norms. They’re about the abuse of power.”
When Carbone joined Minnesota Law in 2013, she brought a wealth of eclectic experience. A self-described nerd who grew up in a large, extended Italian, Catholic, working-class family in Rochester, New York, she fell in love with politics at age 10 and went on to earn an A.B. from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs and a J.D. from Yale. Social justice was her milieu, but a stint as a Department of Justice trial attorney taught her that litigation — putting out fires — was frustrating. In academia, she could help prevent them instead.
As an assistant law professor at George Mason University, she analyzed divorce contracts, a nascent field at the time. She studied patent law critiques and bioethics at Santa Clara University School of Law and then health law at the University of Missouri. Deemed an “inveterate editor” and a “complete delight to work with” by Cahn, she co-wrote books reflecting her expanding interests and societal changes, including the popular Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Marriage Markets: How Inequality is Remaking the American Family (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Despite being a prolific writer, Carbone considers teaching her most important endeavor. “The impact you have on students is immediate, individual, and long-lasting. I’ve always hoped to get students to think differently if they take my classes,” she says. “The evolution of doctrine in a common law system is deeply rooted in policy. So I tend to teach in a way that emphasizes which doctrines are indeterminate and shows how they can be shaped by surrounding political and social forces. I think my classes are challenging because they emphasize the parts of the law that are uncertain.”
As the world evolves, so does Minnesota Law. Carbone is excited by the new additions to the supportive and collegial faculty she has always admired, as well as by the high quality of today’s students. Noting that they are more diverse in their viewpoints and backgrounds but less able to stay focused on details, she is experimenting with different teaching methods to reach them. Although she is known for giving hard exams, she explains that students can earn A’s in multiple ways, whether they excel at systematic learning or choose to dig deep into issues with no obvious answers.
When she isn’t expending her considerable energy on hobbies like rowing and cross-country skiing, Carbone is busy contemplating her next book. People are unhappy, she says, and not just blue-collar workers. Even those with well-paying jobs suffer in a winner-take-all corporate structure, where employers focus only on what was accomplished last week. “Industrial capitalism has become corrupt and exploitative, producing a moral shift. We need to rethink the foundations of individual security and stability,” she says. “This is not women being oppressed by men. This is the emergence of a new economic model. Women are the canaries in the coal mine for what’s wrong with the system.”
“She brings it all together,” Cahn says of Carbone’s talent for linking theoretical perspectives with the real world. “She keeps building on what she has already explored, and it keeps enriching her scholarship.”