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Home Faculty»Serena Mayeri
Serena Mayeri

Contact Information

Phone
2158986728
Email

smayeri@law.upenn.edu

Articles in Repository
Papers on SSRN

Serena Mayeri

Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law; Professor of History

Serena Mayeri’s scholarship focuses on the historical impact of progressive and conservative social movements on legal and constitutional change.

Her book, Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2011) received the Littleton-Griswold Prize from the American Historical Association and the Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians.

Mayeri’s current book project, tentatively titled Marital Privilege: Challenging the Legal Status of Marriage, 1960-2003, examines the history of challenges to marriage’s primacy as a legal institution and a source of public and private benefits. Related articles have appeared in the California Law Review and the Yale Law Journal. Mayeri teaches courses in family law, employment discrimination, gender and the law, and legal history.

She holds a secondary appointment in the Department of History, and is a Core Faculty member in the Program on Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. In 2016, Mayeri was named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. In 2019, she received the Robert A. Gorman Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Education

  • PhD (History)Yale2006
  • JDYale2001
  • ABHarvard1997

Courses Taught

  • Family Law| Law and Social Movements in Twentieth-Century America| Employment Discrimination| Gender and the Law in Recent American History| Feminist Legal Advocacy in the Twentieth-Century United States| Marriage: History and Law

Expertise

    • Constitutional Law and Civil Rights
    • Employment and Labor Law
    • Family Law and Child Advocacy
    • Gender, Leadership, and the Law
    • Legal History
    • Social Justice, Equity, and Inclusion

Related Links

Featured Research

More Publications

Equal Protection in Dobbs and Beyond: How States Protect Life Inside and Outside of the Abortion Context (2022)

Equal Protection and Abortion: Brief of Equal Protection Constitutional Law Scholars Serena Mayeri, Melissa Murray, and Reva Siegel as Amici Curiae in Support of Respondents in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2021)

After Suffrage: The Unfinished Business of Feminist Legal Advocacy, 129 YALE L. J. F. 512 (2020).

Intersectionality and the Constitution of Family Status, 32 CONST. COMMENT. 377 (2017).

Foundling Fathers: (Non-)Marriage and Parental Rights in the Age of Equality, 125 YALE L.J. 2292 (2016).

Marriage (In)equality and the Historical Legacies of Feminism, 6 CALIF. L. REV. CIRCUIT 126 (2015).

Marital Supremacy and the Constitution of the Non-Marital Family, 103 CALIF. L. REV.1277 (2015).

Working Papers

working papers

The Status of Marriage: Marital Supremacy Challenged and Remade, 1960-2000 (work-in-progress).

working papers

The State of Illegitimacy After the Civil Rights Revolution, in INTIMATE STATES: GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND GOVERNANCE IN MODERN U.S. HISTORY (Margot Canaday, Nancy F. Cott, and Robert O. Self eds., University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

working papers

Race, Sexual Citizenship, and the Constitution of Nonmarital Motherhood, in HETEROSEXUAL HISTORIES (Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell eds., New York University Press, forthcoming 2021).

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