Professor Susan Frelich Appleton is a nationally known expert in family law. Her research, scholarship, and writings address such legal issues as adoption, assisted reproduction, gender and parentage, surrogacy, and abortion rights. She has co-authored a family law casebook, now in its fourth edition, as well as a casebook on adoption and assisted reproduction, and she has published extensively on family law matters in law reviews. A member of the American Law Institute (ALI), she holds the office of Secretary and serves on the ALI Council. She also sits on the Board of Directors of the American Bar Foundation.

Previously, Professor Appleton was an adviser to the ALI’s Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution and also worked as consultant to the New Jersey Bioethics Commission, assisting that agency in its recommendations for laws addressing “surrogate-mother” arrangements. Professor Appleton is a recipient of the law school’s Triennial Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award and Washington University’s Distinguished Faculty Award. She was the John S. Lehmann Research Professor in 2009–10. She is a prolific speaker and panelist at conferences and workshops on topics that include gender, parentage, reproductive rights, child custody, and the non-traditional family at venues such as the American Society of Legal History, University of Virginia, and the Center for Reproductive Rights. At the law school, she served as associate dean of faculty for six years. She currently is serving as Washington University’s first Ombuds, facilitating the informal resolution or management of faculty-related conflicts or concerns on the Danforth Campus.  Before becoming a law professor, she clerked for law school alumnus, the Hon. William H. Webster, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

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