Professor Susan Frelich Appleton

Susan Frelich Appleton is the Lemma Barkeloo and Phoebe Couzins Professor of Law at Washington University School of Law, where she teaches family law, reproductive rights, conflict of laws, and criminal law.

Professor Appleton was elected to the ALI in June 1987 and was elected to the Council in May 1994. She currently serves as Chair of the Governance Committee and was previously an Adviser on the Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution project..  

Professor Appleton 's research, scholarship, and writings address such legal issues as adoption, assisted reproduction, gender and parentage, surrogacy, and abortion rights. She has co-authored a family law casebook, now in its fifth edition, as well as a casebook on adoption and assisted reproduction, and she has published extensively on family law matters in law reviews.

She sits on the Board of Directors of the American Bar Foundation and she previously held the office of Secretary of ALI (2004-13). She also worked as consultant to the New Jersey Bioethics Commission, assisting that agency in its recommendations for laws addressing “surrogate-mother” arrangements.

Professor Appleton serves as a speaker and panelist on topics that include gender, parentage, reproductive rights, child custody, and non-traditional families at workshops, conferences, and other venues, including UC Davis Law School, where she delivered the Brigitte Bodenheimer Lecture on Family Law in March 2013. At the law school, she served as associate dean of faculty for six years. In 2010-12, she served as Washington University’s first Ombuds, facilitating the informal resolution or management of faculty-related conflicts or concerns on the Danforth Campus. Before becoming a law professor, she clerked for law school alumnus, Judge William H. Webster, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

EDUCATION: Vassar College, A.B.; University of California Berkeley, J.D.