Participant Info

First Name

Sara

Last Name

Mayeux

City

Nashville

State

TN

Zip Code

37206

Research Interests

public defenders, indigent defense, legal history, constitutional law, criminal law, criminal procedure, legal profession, mass incarceration, criminal justice, prisons

Willing to be contacted by the media

Yes

On the academic market

No

University

Vanderbilt University

About Me

Sara Mayeux is a legal historian of the twentieth-century United States, focusing on criminal law and procedure, constitutional law, and legal culture. She is also interested broadly in the interplay between law and history. She is working on a book, tentatively titled Free Justice: Poverty, Democracy, and the Rights of the Accused in Twentieth-Century America (under contract with the University of North Carolina Press), which examines the relationship in American legal culture between the constitutional right to counsel, the history of indigent defense and public defender offices, and ideas about fair trial and democratic governance. Mayeux has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships. Most recently in 2017, her Columbia Law Review article, “What Gideon Did," received the Cromwell Article Prize, awarded annually for the best article in American legal history published by an early career scholar. Mayeux earned her law degree, as well as her PhD in history, from Stanford University. Before joining Vanderbilt’s law faculty in 2016, she was a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Berger-Howe Legal History Fellow at Harvard Law School. Before entering the legal academy, she clerked for Judge Marsha S. Berzon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Email

sara.mayeux@vanderbilt.edu