Yvette Lindgren
Professor of Law
B.A., cum laude, University of California, Los Angeles, 1988
J.D., University of California College of the Law, 1991
LL.M., UC Berkeley School of Law, 2009
J.S.D., UC Berkeley School of Law, 2013
Member, California State Bar
Professor Lindgren is a nationally recognized scholar in reproductive rights and justice, constitutional law, and family law whose work sits at the intersection of law, medicine, and gender. She brings more than a decade of law teaching experience to the classroom, along with an extensive record of scholarship, public engagement, and advocacy in reproductive health, rights, and justice.
Professor Lindgren's research focuses on abortion regulation, reproductive autonomy, and the legal consequences of the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. She is interested in exploring how criminal abortion bans affect patients, providers, and the broader healthcare system and how tort law and other private-law mechanisms have been deployed and may be reclaimed to protect reproductive rights. Her research explores how abortion’s meaning is not static but rather is socially and legally constructed. Her work has analyzed the Supreme Court's evolving abortion jurisprudence through alternative lenses of healthcare and constitutional rights and how the antiabortion movement transformed their messaging from protecting fetal life to protecting a way of life that became part of the larger family values movement. Her scholarship has appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals and law reviews including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Cornell Law Review, the North Carolina Law Review, the Fordham Law Review, and the Southern California Law Review, among others. She co-authored an amicus brief in the Supreme Court June Medical Services v. Gee case and has contributed commentary for the series, Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tort Opinions.
The role of the professor is not to fill a bucket, but to light a fire. Developing critical legal thinking skills rather than solely rote memorization is important because while law is always changing, the one constant is that law functions as a tool for achieving both oppression and justice. Studying law as a critical legal undertaking will help students distinguish between the two and strive for the latter.
Prior to joining Southwestern, Professor Lindgren was Associate Professor of Law at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law, where she received the Daniel L. Brenner Faculty Publishing Award in 2022 and the Pierson Teaching Award in 2025. She has also served as Visiting Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, the University of California College of the Law San Francisco, the University of San Francisco School of Law, and the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Professor Lindgren began her academic career as a Post-Doctoral Legal Fellow at the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice at Berkeley Law, where she received the Elena R. Gutiérrez Award for her exceptional commitment to the cause and service of reproductive justice.
Professor Lindgren is a frequent contributor to national media and policy conversations on reproductive health law and has appeared on public radio and television programs including KCUR and Kansas City PBS, and her commentary has been cited in national news outlets and in amicus briefs before federal courts. She currently serves as Co-Chair of the Feminist Legal Theory Collaborative Research Network at Law & Society and as a member of the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Law, Medicine, and Health Care.