Serena Mayeri, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law at Penn Carey Law School, has received the Law and Society Association’s 2026 James Willard Book Prize for her new book, Marital Privilege: Marriage, Inequality, and the Transformation of American Law (Yale University Press, 2025). The prize is awarded annually to the best work in socio-legal history published in the previous year.
Drawing from archival research, legal documents, and historical case studies, Marital Privilege examines how the privileged legal status of marriage survived decades of constitutional struggle and social change. The monograph is Dr. Mayeri’s second book. Her first, Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2011), details how the tumultuous political and legal climate of the United States during the 1960s and 1970s transformed the links between race and sex equality, civil rights, and feminism.
A Penn faculty member since 2006, Dr. Mayeri also writes about reproductive rights and justice and about history’s role in constitutional discourse and litigation. In addition to her primary appointments in law and history, she is a core faculty member in Penn’s program on gender, sexuality, and women’s studies. She teaches courses in family law, employment discrimination, reproductive rights and justice, gender and the law, and legal history
Dr. Mayeri is a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where she majored in social studies. She holds a juris doctorate and a Ph.D. in history from Yale University.