Doriane Coleman is Professor of Law at Duke Law School, where she specializes in interdisciplinary scholarship focused on women, children, medicine, sports, and law. Her work, single- and co-authored, has been published in numerous U.S. and international journals including in the Columbia Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, the Georgetown Law Journal, the Notre Dame Law Review, the Cardozo Law Review, the William and Mary Law Review, Law & Contemporary Problems, the American Journal of Law and Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Pediatrics, the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, the American Journal of International Law Unbound, and the International Sports Law Review. She has also written numerous op-eds including for The Washington Post and The New York Times, and is regularly cited in the press on issues related to her work by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and The Christian Science Monitor, among others.
Her most recent scholarship has centered on sex, its evolving definition, and the implications of this evolution for institutions ranging from elite sport to medicine and, of course, to law. The first two articles in this series – Sex in Sport and Re-affirming the Value of the Sports Exception to Title IX's General Non-Discrimination Rule – have been widely read and used in discussions and policymaking around the eligibility criteria for the female category in elite and education-based sport. A third article in the series – Sex Neutrality – traces the history of sex in law and addresses the merits of a move to complete sex-blindness; it is part of a journal volume she co-edited called Sex in Law. She is currently working on a book called Sex Matters.
With her colleague Thavolia Glymph, Coleman is the recipient of a Duke Endowment grant for their research project Reckoning with Race, Gender, and the Law of Slavery and Freedom: The Story and History of Ellen Craft. This work is part of Duke University’s broader project Reckoning with Race, Racism & the History of the American South.
Coleman is co-director of Duke Law’s Center for Sports Law and Policy; a Faculty Fellow and Member of the Advisory Council of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University; a Faculty Associate of the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine; an Associate of the Duke Initiative for Science & Society; and an Affiliate of the Duke Center for Child and Family Policy.
A regular teacher of 1L Torts, Coleman is co-author with Professor Donald H. Beskind of the first-year casebook Torts: Doctrine and Process, which is printed by the Duke University Press.
Coleman received her Juris Doctor degree from Georgetown Law (1988), and her Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University (1982). She was a litigation associate at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering before beginning her academic and teaching career at Howard University School of Law. While she was at Wilmer, she worked on the development of the world’s first random, out-of-competition drug-testing program for what is now USA Track & Field, a project which led to her years-long engagement with the Olympic Movement’s anti-doping and eligibility efforts.
Before law school, Coleman ran the 800 meters in collegiate and international competition, where she was a multiple All American, All East, and All Ivy athlete, the U.S. National Collegiate Indoor Champion in 1982, the U.S. National Indoor Champion (with teammates) in the 4 x 400 meters relay in 1982, and the Swiss National Champion in 1982 and 1983. Over her athletic career she competed for Villanova, Cornell, the Swiss and U.S. National Teams, Athletics West, the Santa Monica and Atoms Track Clubs, and Lausanne Sports.
