Sara Mayeux has been appointed to the Mildred Prescott Miller Chair in Law. Her appointment was announced by Chris Guthrie, Dean, University Distinguished Professor, and John Wade-Kent Syverud Professor of Law.
The chair was established in 2025 by the Prescott Miller Foundation through its directors, James B. Miller, Jr. ’64, Nathaniel Prescott Miller, and Elizabeth M. Armstrong (BA’00) in honor of Mildred Prescott Miller. James B. Miller is the Chairman of Ameris Bank. Prior to Ameris, he served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Fidelity Southern Corporation since its inception in 1979. He is an emeritus member of the Law School’s Board of Advisors.
“Sara is one of the nation’s preeminent legal historians, a celebrated teacher, and a highly valued member of the Vanderbilt Law community,” said Dean Guthrie. “I’m grateful to Jim and the Prescott Miller Foundation, whose generosity enables us to support her work.”
Professor Mayeux’s work focuses on criminal law and procedure, constitutional law, and legal culture. Her book Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America 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. It chronicles debates about indigent criminal defense from the Progressive Era through the Cold War. Her 2017 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.
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.
