Spring Symposia – Marital Privilege: Marriage, Inequality, and the Transformation of American Law
Presented by New England Law Review
March 31, 2026 at 4:30pm EST
Join us for an engaging event featuring Serena Mayeri, author of Marital Privilege, as she examines how American law has long provided public benefits and private economic resources through marriage, even amid dramatic changes in family life over the last half century. This timely and thought-provoking book challenges assumptions about equality, family structure, and the role of marriage in distributing legal and economic security.
Mayeri, alongside with her fellow panelists will discuss the book’s central themes, including the activists and litigants who challenged the legal primacy of marriage and the constitutional arguments they advanced in a pursuit of liberty and equality. Through a blend of legal history and social critique, Mayeri highlights how reforms reduced overt discrimination against women, people of color, children born outside marriage, and LGBTQ Americans, yet left marriage’s privileged status largely intact. She further explores how marital primacy has intensified racial and economic inequality and considers what these patterns reveal about the limits of legal reform and the ongoing need to rethink how law allocates rights and resources in modern family life.
Professor Serena Mayeri
Professor Serena Mayeri is the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School where she teaches courses in family law, employment discrimination, reproductive rights, gender and the law, and legal history.
In addition to her tenure, Professor Mayeri is an accomplished author. She frequently writes about reproductive rights, equal protection, civil rights, the role of history in constitutional law, and other constitutional law focused issues. The featured piece, Martial Privilege, is Professor Mayeri’s sophomore piece. She published her first book, Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution in 2011 with Harvard University Press, earning her both the Littileton-Griswold Prize from the American Historical Association and Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians. In addition to her impressive contributions to legal scholarship, Professor Mayeri has also co-authored several selected amicus briefs.
Professor Mayeri 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 (GSWS). She has served on the executive committees of GSWS and of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy. In addition to her other awards honoring her accomplishment in legal scholarship, Mayeri was named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians in 2016. In 2019, she received the Robert A. Gorman Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Prior to teaching law, Professor Mayeri clerked for the Honorable Guido Calabresi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and was a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow at New York University. She earned her J.D. and Ph.D. from Yale University, and her A.B. from Harvard College.
Panelists
Serena Mayeri
Courtney Joslin
Martha Davis
Suzanne Kim
Marital Privilege