Мэри Джо Фруг: Әйел құқығының белгілі ғалымы және шешілмеген құпиялы қылмыс

American legal scholar

Mary Joe Frug (née Gaw; 1941 – April 4, 1991) was a professor at New England Law Boston, and a leading feminist legal scholar. She is considered a forerunner of legal postmodern feminist theory. Much of her work was collected in the posthumously published book, Postmodern Legal Feminism. She is the author of the casebook Women and the Law. On April 4, 1991, Frug was murdered on the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, near the home that she shared with her husband, Harvard Law professor Gerald Frug, and their two children. The murder remains unsolved.

Frug received a Bachelor of Arts from Wellesley College, a Juris Doctor from the National Law Center at George Washington University, and a Master of Laws from New York University. She worked for three years providing free legal services to low income clients in Washington, D. C. and New York. From 1975 to 1981, she was a professor at the Villanova University School of Law. In 1981, she joined the New England School of Law, where she taught until 1991. At the time of her death, she was on sabbatical, doing research as a fellow at Radcliffe College’s Bunting Institute. Fem Crits applied the principles of CLS to feminism, to show how the law subordinates women in a male dominated power structure. The group has been described as a foundational part of "progressive resistance to conservative legal thought" during the 1980s Reagan revolution, and a breakaway move from the "white male dominated Conference on Critical Legal Studies."

Frug was born as Mary Joe Gaw in St. Joseph, Missouri in 1941. In 1968, she married Gerald Frug, with whom she had two children, Stephen and Emily.

The investigation by local police was soon joined by other police departments and the FBI. Frug's purse was found at the scene, which led investigators to rule out robbery as the motive. A witness a block away described a white male, 5'10" 6'0", late teens to early 20s, brown hair, dressed in dark clothing, running from the scene. Shoe prints were found and plaster casts taken. The murder weapon, unrecovered, was determined to be a military style knife. A knife was found near the crime scene, but forensic examination failed to connect it to the murder. There were no suspects, no leads, and no idea of motive at the time. Frug's murder remains unsolved. In 2019, a newly formed cold case unit in Middlesex County, Massachusetts took up the case.

In March 1992, the prestigious, student edited scholarly journal, the Harvard Law Review published an unfinished draft article by Frug called "A Postmodern Feminist Legal Manifesto," which explored legal theories on violence toward women. Gerald Frug had submitted the article on his late wife's behalf. Some members of the Review were opposed to publishing the piece, and later parodied it in "He Manifesto of Post Mortem Legal Feminism", which was included in the Harvard Law Revue, an annual spoof of the Review. The essay argued that Frug's theories were the concoction of paranoid feminists. It was filled with inside jokes and sexual innuendo, suggested that Frug's husband's tenure at Harvard Law was the only reason the paper was published, and mocked her death. Co authors Craig Coben and Kenneth Fenyo 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. The statement was signed by other members of the Review, including the then editor Paul Clement.