Lauren E. Threatte

Office: Swen Parson 197B

Phone: 815-753-8595

Email: lthreatte@niu.edu

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About

Assistant Professor Lauren E. Threatte (“Threet”) teaches courses in property law, sociolegal studies, gender justice, and criminal law. Professor Threatte began her career at NIU in 2022 as the inaugural DEI Postdoctoral Fellow with the College of Law and Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality. Before coming to NIU, she performed social policy research and racial justice education and programming at Brandeis University during her doctoral studies. Professor Threatte began her teaching career as T.A. for Professor Anita Hill at Brandeis University. Before her entry into the legal academy, Professor Threatte earned a doctoral degree from The Heller School for Social Policy and Management. Her Ph.D. dissertation is titled, Breaking Ground: Building Critical Institutional Identity Theory to Transform DEI Construction & Ideology in Elite Higher Education.

Professor Threatte’s legal scholarship is classified as multi-disciplinary sociolegal and critical legal studies. Her work applies and/or develops legal theory to reveal and investigate how the law can produce or eradicate social injustice, including developing new ways to conceptualize discrimination, property, power and privilege. As a whole, her research reveals how patriarchy and hegemonic gender construction restrict bodily autonomy, self-identity construction and truth building for marginalized people.

Professor Threatte’s most recent work, Femininity Strikes Back: Redefining Gender and Stereotypes in Anti-discrimination Doctrine to Advance Reproductive Justice, is published in the Yale Journal for Law and Feminism. In this paper, she discusses how anti-choice law enforces hegemonic femininity and proposes a new equal protection theory that treats femininity as a gender classification. Her current paper is a property law piece that builds property theory and feminist theory. It is titled, Epistemic Property and “The Man in the High Castle”: The Emergence of a White Heteropatriarchy. This paper establishes a jurisprudence of epistemic property, drawing from theories of epistemology and copyright law. From a feminist perspective, Professor Threatte argues that specific property interests of the dominant class are exceeding their right to protection and closing the public epistemic domain in order to advance a White heteropatriarchal regime.

Threatte’s next paper is "When Truth is Trespass": Aggrieved Entitlement and Epistemic Property. This article utilizes Michael Kimmel’s concept of aggrieved entitlement to explain why members of dominant groups treat anti-oppression and feminist epistemologies as threats to an assumed social order. Her research agenda also includes a paper titled, Prince and Epistemic Property: Recognizing a Creator’s Interest in Meaning-making. Using Prince as a case study, this paper expands epistemic property to recognize a creator’s authority over the conditions, processes and terms that produce their work and thus, their identity—as distinct from the intellectual property rights in creative works.

She has presented her scholarship at the 2026 AALS Annual Meeting, the 2026 Lutie A. Lytle Conference and Writing Workshop, the 2023 Junior Scholars Conference at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, and the 2020 annual conference of the Association for Public Policy and Management (APPAM).

Professor Threatte’s legal practice experience includes representing indigent clients in criminal and civil litigation as an Assistant Public Defender for the Office of the Cook County Public Defender, in Chicago. She also worked for the City of Chicago performing sexual harassment trainings and investigations and evaluating EEO policy for the Office of Compliance. During law school, she clerked with Chicago Board of Education Litigation Department, Children’s Law Center of Los Angeles, and the Juvenile Justice Division of Los Angeles County Circuit Court where she worked under the guidance of Judge Cynthia Loo. After earning her J.D., she was awarded the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA) Fellowship and clerked with California Circuit Court Judge Victoria Chaney along with two complex litigation law firms in Southern California.

Professor Threatte is the faculty advisor for the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) and the Disability Students’ Alliance at NIU. She identifies as a Black American woman with diverse ancestry. She is an ally to the LGBTQ+ community, the disability community and undocumented students. She is the faculty advisor for the certificate in Law and Women’s and Gender Studies at NIU.

She is a member of the Society for American Law Teachers (SALT), Lutie Lytle Legacy Society, Black Women Lawyers Association (BWLA), Chicago Bar Association (CBA), Black Women’s Studies Association, and National Women’s Studies Association. She has also served as a board member and bar exam teacher for Minority Legal Education Resources (MLER), beginning in 2006, and has taught law graduates on the campuses of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and Depaul University College of Law.

Education

• B.A., University of Iowa
• M.A., The Heller School, Brandeis University
• J.D., University of Southern California (USC) Gould School of Law
• Ph.D., The Heller School, Brandeis University