Chicago News Cooperative on Catharine MacKinnon's Sex Trafficking Talk at the Law School

Chicago just hosted an infuriatingly insightful show and tell on sex trafficking, with a prominent legal scholar providing the tell and a West Side pimp the sordid show.

It happened while Catharine MacKinnon packed a University of Chicago Law School auditorium for a lecture on “Trafficking, Prostitution and Inequality” just as a federal courtroom revealed the thankfully short run of United States of America vs. Datqunn Sawyer, a/k/a “Daddy,” “P,” “P Child,” “Pharo,” “Pimpin’ P” and “Rabbit.”

When I mentioned this later, MacKinnon didn’t know of the coincidence. It didn’t matter. Worldwide she’s encountered both the likes of Sawyer, who was convicted Monday of running a prostitution ring, and their mostly female victims.

“The underlying allegations fit perfectly into the world I study and engage,” she told me. “Going after this pimp is exactly what should be done, and the facts are standard,” alluding to the violent ways of Sawyer.

MacKinnon is a charismatic, even intrepid, scholar and feminist activist who helped pioneer the legal claim for sexual harassment. She serves as special gender adviser to the International Criminal Court, helped win a case establishing the rape of Bosnian women by Serbs as an act of genocide, and is one of the most-cited legal scholars in the English language, said Michael Schill, the law school dean.