Jennifer B. Wriggins

Professor Wriggins is a nationally recognized scholar whose work focuses on torts, insurance, health law, and family law, with a frequent focus on race and gender. She set the tone for her research with her first published article, Rape, Racism and the Law (Harvard Women’s Law Journal, 1983), which has been reprinted in abridged form many times during the past 30 years. Many of her other articles are frequently cited and excerpted in books. Her recent publications have focused on federal flood insurance and climate change as well as race, racism, and personal injury damages.

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). Her research was cited in Hernandez-Adams v. Kimpson, a 2015 New York watershed case involving a Hispanic child which held that it was unconstitutional to use race-based tables to determine damages in a lead poisoning case. 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 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. She currently co-directs the Information Privacy Law program at Maine Law. 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.

Selected Publications:

Commentary on Keeping Cases from Black Juries, 73 WASH. & LEE L. REV. ONLINE 401 (2016). [WASH. & LEE]

In Deep: Dilemmas of Federal Flood Insurance Reform, 5 UC IRVINE L. REV. 1443 (2015). [PDF]

Flood Money: The Challenge of U.S. Flood Insurance Reform in a Warming World, 119 PENN ST. L. REV. 361 (2014). [PDF] [SSRN]

Op-ed, While Antarctica Melts, Congress Ensures Beach Houses are Covered, TALKING POINTS MEMO, May 16, 2014. [Talking Points]

Mandates, Markets, and Risk: Auto Insurance and the Affordable Care Act, 19 CONN. INS. L.J. 275 (2013). [SSRN]

Academic Commentary, The Power of Citizens’ Initiatives and the Marriage Vote in Maine, January 17, 2013. [JURIST]

Is the Health Insurance Individual Mandate ‘Unprecedented’?: The Case of Auto Insurance, (Apr. 6, 2012). [SSRN]

Op-Ed., Individual Mandates are Nothing New: Auto Insurance Laws Show that Government is Capable of Creating Solutions to Collective Problems, such as Health Care, PORTLAND PRESS HERALD, Mar. 18, 2012. [PPH]

THE MEASURE OF INJURY: RACE, GENDER, AND TORT LAW (2010) (with Prof. Martha Chamallas). [Amazon]