Biography
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. Her book, Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America (UNC Press, 2020), was praised in The Nation magazine as “a definitive history of this important yet conflicted institution,” and received the 2020 Langum Prize in American Legal History. The book chronicles debates about indigent criminal defense from the Progressive Era through the Cold War. In 2017, her Columbia Law Review article on the effects of Gideon v. Wainwright, “What Gideon Did," received the Cromwell Article Prize, awarded annually for the best article in American legal history published by an early career scholar. Professor Mayeux earned her law degree, as well as her Ph.D. 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.
Programs
Education
Ph.D. (U.S. history) Stanford University
J.D. Stanford Law School
B.A. (history) Princeton University
Related Resources
Publications
The Mob Lawyer’s Constitution
“The Mob Lawyer’s Constitution,” Journal of American Constitutional History 1, no. 4 (2023)
FULL TEXT: | PDFMake All the Laws You Want’: The Catholic Left against Legal Liberalism, circa 1968
“‘Make All the Laws You Want’: The Catholic Left against Legal Liberalism, circa 1968,” Journal of Law and Religion 38, no. 2 (2023)
FULL TEXT: | PDFThe Federal Courts and Criminal Justice
“The Federal Courts and Criminal Justice,” in Approaches to Federal Judicial History, ed. Gautham Rao, Winston Bowman, & Clara Altman (Federal Judicial Center, 2020)
FULL TEXT: SSRNFree Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America
Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America, University of North Carolina Press (2020)
FULL TEXT: | WWWThe Idea of ‘the Criminal Justice System,’
"The Idea of ‘the Criminal Justice System,’" 45 American Journal of Criminal Law 55 (2018)
FULL TEXT: SSRNAn Honest But Fearless Fighter
"‘An Honest But Fearless Fighter’: The Adversarial Ideal of Public Defenders in 1930s and ’40s Los Angeles," 36 Law and History Review 619 (2018)
FULL TEXT: | WWWYouth and Punishment at the Roberts Court
"Youth and Punishment at the Roberts Court," 21 University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 543 (2018)
FULL TEXT: | BEPRESSFederalism Anew
"Federalism Anew," 56 American Journal of Legal History 128 (2016) (with Karen Tani)
FULL TEXT: | WWWWhat Gideon Did
Ineffective Assistance of Counsel Before
"Ineffective Assistance of Counsel Before Powell v. Alabama: Lessons from History for the Future of the Right to Counsel," 99 Iowa Law Review 2161 (symposium contribution, 2014). Cited by the Iowa Supreme Court in State v. Young (April 3, 2015)
FULL TEXT: SSRNThe Origins of Back-end Sentencing in California
"The Origins of Back-end Sentencing in California," 22 Stanford Law & Policy Review 529 (2011)
FULL TEXT: | WWWThe Case of the Black-Gloved Rapist: Defining the Public Defender in the California Courts, 1913-1948
"The Case of the Black-Gloved Rapist: Defining the Public Defender in the California Courts, 1913-1948," 5 California Legal History 217 (2010)
FULL TEXT: | WWW