Joan Meier is the National Family Violence Law Center Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. Over the past thirty years, she has taught three different domestic violence legal clinics, two of which were award-winning. 

 

Professor Meier's primary focus has been on domestic abuse survivors and protective parents in custody litigation, and she has published widely on those topics.  In 2004 Joan launched, directed, and led the litigation at the Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project (DV LEAP), where she litigated hundreds of appeals, trained judges, lawyers and experts and advocates, and developed valuable technical assistance resources for the domestic violence field.  In 2019 she and a team of social scientists completed a federally funded 5-year empirical study of the nation's family court outcomes in custody cases involving abuse and alienation allegations.  In 2020 she stepped down from DV LEAP and launched the National Family Violence Law Center at GW.  The Center employs research, professional education, policy development, and appellate advocacy to improve the legal system's response to adult and child victims of family violence. The Center bridges the gap between the domestic violence and child abuse fields while offering research-based policy guidance for the overlapping concerns of both fields.