Jennifer Bennett Shinall

Professor of Law

Jennifer Bennett Shinall’s research focuses on discrimination, particularly in the areas of gender and disability. Her research, which has been published in peer-reviewed economic journals and law journals, examines how obesity, pregnancy and health status more generally affect labor market outcomes. Her work further considers how these effects may differ by gender and how the legal system can address any observed disparities. Professor Shinall was the first graduate of the Ph.D. Program in Law and Economics at Vanderbilt University. Before returning to Vanderbilt as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Law and Economics in 2013, Shinall was a clerk for Judge John Tinder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She earned an A.B. in economics and history at Harvard University and her J.D. and Ph.D. in law and economics at Vanderbilt Law School, where she served as senior articles editor for Vanderbilt Law Review and was elected to the Order of the Coif. Shinall teaches Employment Discrimination Law and Employment Law to J.D. students and also teaches Labor Markets and Human Resources and the Ph.D. Workshop for the Ph.D. Program in Law and Economics.

Representative Publications

• “Protecting Pregnancy,” 106 Cornell Law Review 987 (2021)
  Full Text | SSRN
• "Identifying Meaningful Eating Behavior and Physical Activity Questions for Individual and Population Health," Clinical Obesity (2021) (with Kelly Haws, et.al.) (peer-reviewed, first author)
  Full Text | WWW
• "Anticipating Accomodation," 105 Iowa Law Review 621 (2020)
  Full Text | SSRN
• "Settling in the Shadow of Sex: Gender Bias in Marital Asset Division," 40 Cardozo Law Review 1857 (2019). Reprinted in Women and the Law (2020) (Tracy A. Thomas, editor)
  Full Text | SSRN
• “When Equitable is Not Equal: Experimental Evidence on the Division of Marital Assets in Divorce,” 18 Review of Economics of the Household 655 (2020) (with Joni Hersch)
  Full Text | WWW
• “Estimating Years of Education Using the Current Population Survey after 2014,” 190 Economics Letters (2020) (with Joni Hersch and Fernando Mendoza Lopez)
  Full Text | WWW
• "The Pregnancy Penalty," 103 Minnesota Law Review 749 (2018)
  Full Text | WWW
• "Imputation Match Bias in Immigrant Wage Convergence," 55 Demography 1475 (2018) (with Joni Hersch)
  Full Text | WWW
• “Something to Talk About: Information Exchange under Employment Law,” 165 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 49 (2017) (with Joni Hersch)
  Full Text | SSRN | WWW
• “The Substantially Impaired Sex: Uncovering the Gendered Nature of Disability Discrimination,” 101 Minnesota Law Review 1099 (2017)
  Full Text | WWW