Doriane Coleman

Doriane Coleman is a Professor of Law at Duke Law School, where she specializes in interdisciplinary scholarship focused on women, children, medicine, sports, and law. Her recent work has centered on sex, including its evolving definition and its implications for institutions ranging from elite sport to medicine and, of course, to law. A first article in this series, Sex in Sport , is at 80 LAW & CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS 63-126 (2017), and a second, Re-affirming the Value of the Sports Exception to Title IX’s General Non-Discrimination Rule, is at 27 DUKE J. GENDER L. & POL’Y 69 (2020). She is currently working on a third article on Sex in Medicine and a book project called Sex in Law.

A regular teacher of Torts, Coleman is co-author of the first-year casebook Torts: Doctrine and Process (2019). She is also co-director of the Law School’s Center for Sports Law and Policy, a faculty affiliate of the University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities and the History of Medicine, and the Center for Child and Family Policy. Her recent cross-campus projects include co-leading a Bass Connections team on Cheating, Gaming, and Rule Fixing: Challenges for Ethics Across the Adversarial Professions (2018-19), and directing the program Head Trauma in Football: Implications for Medicine, Law, and Policy (2018).

Coleman received her Juris Doctor degree from Georgetown Law (1988), and her Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University (1982). She was a litigation associate at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering before beginning her academic and teaching career at Howard University School of Law. While she was at Wilmer, she worked on the development of the world’s first random, out-of-competition drug-testing program for what is now USA Track & Field, a project which led to her years-long engagement with the Olympic Movement’s anti-doping efforts.

Before law school, Coleman ran the 800 meters in collegiate and international competition, where she was a multiple All American, All East, and All Ivy athlete, the U.S. National Collegiate Indoor Champion in 1982, the U.S. National Indoor Champion (with teammates) in the 4 x 400 meters relay in 1982, and the Swiss National Champion in 1982 and 1983. Over her athletic career she competed for Villanova, Cornell, the Swiss and U.S. National Teams, Athletics West, the Santa Monica and Atoms Track Clubs, and Lausanne Sports.