Abby Moncrieff joins the CSU Cleveland-Marshall College of Law faculty this Fall as an Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Health Law and Policy.
Professor Moncrieff is an honors graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, was a Fulbright Scholar, and recently earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Texas at Austin. She spent seven years as a professor at Boston University School of Law. She has also worked as a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, University of Pennsylvania Law School and University of Texas at Austin School of Law, as a Scholar in Residence at New York University School of Law and as an Adjunct Professor at St. John’s University School of Law.
Professor Moncrieff loves teaching the law and would have still worked as an adjunct professor were she to have taken a different path into legal practice. But as a full-time academic, she also gets to work on big-picture research and writing, something she considers a primary focus in her career.
This semester, Professor Moncrieff will teach Contracts and Constitutional Law at CSU C|M|LAW in addition to her work with the Center for Health Law and Policy. Her interests are at the intersection of Health Law and Constitutional Law, which she explains is often a neglected intersection.
“Health law scholars generally don’t know much about con law, and con law scholars know practically nothing about health law. But it has been a hugely important intersection for a long time,” said Moncrieff. “A lot of the structural constitutional cases (on federalism and separation of powers) have involved healthcare programs, and the most controversial rights cases of the past 50 years have centered on the doctor-patient relationship and the right to bodily autonomy.”
Since her third year of law school, Professor Moncrieff has been working on a grand reimagining of the American constitutional order. That is the subject of her book currently in-progress, Constitutional Technocracy.
“The book really is a holistic reimagining of the American constitutional order,” explained Moncrieff. “I’m trying to dismantle hierarchical understandings of lawmaking and sovereignty, which don’t fit the American political order very well, in favor of a diffuse understanding of lawmaking and sovereignty. So, for example, instead of thinking about the national government as the hierarchically ‘supreme’ lawmaker over the states, I argue that the state and national governments are coequal lawmakers who must actively compete against each other for supremacy.”
This is Professor Moncrieff’s first experience in the Cleveland area, but she is excited to build a strong network of lawyers, writers, thinkers, community activists, and social justice workers all across Cleveland and Northeast Ohio through the Center for Health Law and Policy.
In addition, Professor Moncrieff is excited to return to a cold weather climate with her family that includes her husband, two kids, three step-kids, two dogs, and a hamster, after spending the past five years at the University of Texas. She is an avid figure skater, in addition to enjoying LEGO building and having a “mild addiction” to Disney World.