Margaret Brinig
Contact Information

Fritz Duda Family Chair in Law
3157 Eck Hall of Law
574.631.4197
margaret.brinig.1@nd.edu
Department/affiliation
LawDegrees
B.A., Duke University
J.D., Seton Hall University
M.A., Ph.D., George Mason
Research interests
Law and economics of the family; families, social captial, and social welfare legislation; the impact of Catholic school closures on poor neighborhoods.
Honors/awards
Distinguished University Professor, George Mason University, 1993
Elected to the American Law Institute
Select publications
Lost Classroom, Lost Community: Catholic Schools' Importance in Urban America, with co-author Nicole Stelle Garnett of Notre Dame Law School (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
Family, Law and Community: Supporting the Covenant (University of Chicago Press, 2010)
From Contract to Covenant: Beyond the Law and Economics of the Family (Harvard University Press, 2000)
Bio
Margaret "Peg" Brinig is the Fritz Duda Family Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. This interdisciplinary scholar specializes in family law, contracts, and dispute resolution, and she is known internationally for her work on the law and economics of the family. Her work melds an expertise in law and scoial science in empirical studies of families, social capital, and social welfare legislation. She has written or coauthored a number of books and more than 80 articles, including From Contract to Covenant: Beyond the Law and Economics of the Family and the two-volume collection, The Economics of Family Law. She is also the author of Family, Law and Community: Supporting the Covenant. In this distinctive study of legal reform, she concludes that conventional legal systems and the social programs they engender ignore social capital : the trust and support given to families by a community.
She has conducted groundbreaking research along with Professor of Law Nicole Stelle Garnett on the negative impact of Catholic K-12 school closures on urban neighborhoods. This work yielded scholarly articles and, in 2014, the publication of Lost Classroom, Lost Community: Catholic Schools' Importance in Urban America (University of Chicaog Press). The two authors are both fellows of Notre Dame's Institute for Educational Initiatives and work closely with the Institute's Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE).
Prof. Brinig sits on the executive council of the International Society of Family Law. She has served as a referee for various journals and academic presses. She is a member of the American Law Institute, an executive board member of the International Society for Family Law, and has recently been an officer in both the American and Canadian Law and Economics Associations. She has been an officer in the Socioeconomics and Family Law Sections of the American Association of Law Schools and is currently chair-elect of the Law and Economics section. She holds graduate degrees in both law and economics.