Hilary Catherine Robinson

Professor Robinson's broad research interest involves the role of law and the interaction of legal principles with social norms in the context scientific innovation. In teaching, she aims to bring a multidisciplinary approach to those aspects of the law curriculum that intersect most closely with scientific innovation. During the upcoming academic year, Professor Robinson—both in her research, and with students in a spring seminar—will explore the interaction of intellectual property law with civil society at the site of agricultural biotechnology. In this domain, environmental objectives and local interests often fail to track with the interests of multinational corporations that hold patent rights to specific crop technologies in which they have invested years of research and development.

Professor Robinson comes to VLS from the Department of History, Anthropology, and Science and Technology Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from where she is returning to legal scholarship prior to writing a law-focused dissertation. Her doctoral work considers the nexus of race, statistical probability, and DNA databases at the site of technologically-assisted law enforcement in the modern United States. Professor Robinson analyzes emerging technology for searching DNA databases that enables law enforcers to infer first-order relatedness between a person of interest whose DNA is obtained from a crime scene (but whose identity is otherwise unknown), and a prior offender whose sample has been lawfully included in the database. Such "kinship-based" search technologies raise a number of questions under (at least) the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, and related jurisprudence.

Professor Robinson received her AB, magna cum laude, from Harvard University with a special concentration in genomic science and public policy.Her honors thesis analyzed the impact of reproductive biotechnology on the legal presupposition of a heterosexual, biologically-related family as the basis of the rights and responsibilities of legal kinship; it concluded that the law itself acts like a specialized technology, relying on normative understandings of kinship (reproductive intent), and contractual proof of desire (purchasing technological assistance), rather than biological determinism (genetic relatedness), to render legal parenthood from the reproduction made possible by science (and via sperm and ovum donors, and gestational surrogates). She received her JD from Harvard Law School, where she was co-chairwoman of the Women's Law Association, and served as the Reginald F. Lewis Fellow for Law Teaching from 2006–2007. She has worked between academic terms for law firms Ropes & Gray and Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr, for the Harvard Center for International Development, and for the U.S. Department of State in Pretoria, South Africa, where she assessed the country's capacity for biotechnology development.