Professor Wriggins is a nationally recognized scholar who has published groundbreaking work on race, racism, and torts. She has been a speaker in recent months at numerous law schools (via Zoom) on expanding the first-year Torts course to include a focus on race and racism. Her first published article, Rape, Racism and the Law (Harvard Women’s Law Journal, 1983), has been reprinted in abridged form many times since its publication. She has also published on health law, domestic violence, insurance, and climate change (as related to flood insurance), with a frequent focus on race and gender. Many of her other articles are frequently cited and excerpted in books; some have influenced court decisions and led to legislative changes.
Professor Wriggins is the author of The Measure of Injury: Race, Gender, and Tort Law (NYU Press 2010, co-authored with Professor Martha Chamallas of Ohio State University). She graduated magna cum laude with distinction in philosophy from Yale College and graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School. Upon receiving her J.D., Professor Wriggins served as clerk to Hon. Edward T. Gignoux, U.S. District Judge in Portland, Maine. Prior to joining the faculty of Maine Law, she was a partner at Pressman, Kruskal & Wriggins in Cambridge, Massachusetts; served as an assistant attorney general in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office; and was in private practice in Maine.
Professor Wriggins was a visiting scholar at The George Washington University School of Law and American University-Washington College of Law in 2013-2014, and was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and Boston University School of Law in Spring 2005. At Maine Law, she served as associate dean for research from 2009–2013 and associate dean for academic affairs from 2015-2017. For three years, she co-directed the Information Privacy Law program with Professor Peter Guffin.
Professor Wriggins is a member of the American Law Institute, the Family Law Section of the Maine State Bar Association, and is former chair of the Association of American Law Schools Torts and Compensation Systems section.