Faculty and Administration Profiles

Blanche Bong Cook

About

Professor Blanche Bong Cook is the Curt and Linda Rodin Professor of Law and Social Justice. Before joining Loyola Law, she was a tenured Associate Professor at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, Michigan and the University of Kentucky Rosenberg College of Law in Lexington, Kentucky.

Before joining the academy, she served as an Assistant United States Attorney with the Department of Justice, where she specialized in large-scale drug and sex-trafficking prosecutions. As a federal prosecutor, she briefed and/or argued more than 44 federal appeals.

Professor Cook clerked for the Honorable Damon J. Keith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. She was also an associate at Miller, Canfield, Paddock and Stone in Detroit and Seyfarth Shaw in Chicago, where she specialized in employment discrimination, labor law, and sexual harassment litigation and prevention training.

Professor Cook has established herself as a leading expert on sex trafficking by problematizing the entire spectrum of sex-trafficking prosecutions and the commercialization and exploitation of women and girls. She is actively involved in shaping the emerging nationwide discourse on sex trafficking and victims' rights as it relates to evidentiary issues, race-class-gender profiling, victim blaming, and sex-trafficking statutes. She writes in the areas of sex trafficking, victims’ rights, police violence, implicit bias, criminal procedure, critical race theory, human rights, race and gender discrimination, black feminist legal theory, womanist thought, and the normative gaze of identity.

Her years of practice in the public and private sector inform her teaching philosophy and passion. Her mission is to deconstruct and make readily accessible and transparent the principles and practices of law in ways that are meaningful to students, not only for professional development, but also as a means of augmenting the role that advocacy plays within law and litigation.

Professor Cook is a frequent and sought-after speaker at workshops, conferences, and sexual harassment and implicit bias trainings. She has been a presenter and guest speaker at Yale University, the University of Michigan, AALS, and the Daughters of the Atlantic Conference in Bahia, Brazil. In 2017, she presented a TEDx Talk, entitled An Algorithm for Capturing White Heteropatriarchy, based on the parable of the Woman Caught in Adultery. In 2018, she was a Scholar-in-Residence at the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice, the University of California Berkeley Law, as well as the Annual Ruth Chance Lecturer Honoree. In 2022, Dean Mary Davis and Associate Dean Jennifer Byrd Pollan lobbied Governor Andy Beshear to the bestow the rank of Colonel on Professor Cook. She is officially a Colonel.

Degrees

Program Areas

Criminal law and procedure
Evidence
Appellate practice
Federal courts
Trial advocacy
Employment discrimination
Critical race theory
Critical race feminist theory
Sex trafficking

Courses Taught

Criminal Law
Criminal Procedure (Investigations and Adjudications)
Evidence
Race and the Law
Critical Race Theory
Intersectional Feminism and Police Violence
Sex Trafficking Seminar