Career
She is considered a forerunner of legal postmodern feminist theory, and was a renowned postmodernist and feminist legal scholar. She authored the casebook Women and the Law. In March 1992, the Harvard Law Review published an unfinished draft article by Frug called "A Postmodern Feminist Legal Manifesto," which explored the legal theories on violence toward women.
lieutenant was signed by "Mary Doe, Rigor-Mortis Professor of Law" and argued that Frug"s theories were the concoction of paranoid feminists.
Company-authors Craig Coben and Ken Fenyo later apologized in a statement, particularly to Frug"s husband. They added that they did not mean to distribute the article on the anniversary of her death.
Her views were considered especially infuriating by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who railed against her audacity, and stirred up strong sentiment against her among his students. According to The New York Times:
On April 4, 1991, Mary Joe Frug, a prominent feminist legal scholar at the New England School of Law in Boston, was hacked to death on the streets of Cambridge.
Wielding a military-style knife with a 7-inch-long blade, her assailant, as yet unknown, stabbed her four times.
On April 4, 1992, the Harvard Law Review held its annual gala banquet, when the torch of the nation’s most prestigious legal journal is passed to a new generation of editors. Had he attended, he would have found on his plate a parody of his wife’s last article. lieutenant depicted Mississippi Frug as a humorless, sex-starved mediocrity and dubbed her the “Rigor-Mortis Professor of Law.”
Frug"s casebook, Women and the Law, is still in publication, and is now known as Mary Joe Frug"s Women and the Law.
The New England School of Law houses the "Professor Mary Joe Frug Women and the Law Collection" at its library.
The Women"s Law Caucus at the New England School of Law established the Mary Joe Frug Grant to provide "stipends for students at New England who devote their summers to improving the lives of women."
In 1994 the Mary Joe Frug Fund was launched to establish an endowed chair at the New England School of Law in her memory. This chair would be the first of its kind in the nation and would carry on the legacy of Professor Frug by allowing visiting professors to come to the New England School of Law and teach women"s issues in the law.
