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| Professor Anna Lvovsky (credit) |
We are delighted to welcome Professor Anna Lvovsky to the blog this month. An assistant professor at Harvard Law School, she teaches American legal history, the history of policing, criminal law, and evidence. Her research focuses on "the legal and cultural dimensions of policing, judicial uses of professional knowledge, and the regulation of gender, sexuality, and morality."
One of her major research projects these past years has been her recently published book, Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall (University of Chicago Press), which grew out of her award-winning dissertation. Vice Patrol is a history of state repression of queer communities in the mid-twentieth-century U.S.
Cribbing here from the Press's description, the book
trac[es] the tactics used to criminalize, profile, and suppress gay life from the 1930s through the 1960s, and the surprising controversies those tactics often inspired in court. Lvovsky shows that the vice squads’ campaigns stood at the center of live debates about not only the law’s treatment of queer people, but also the limits of ethical policing, the authority of experts, and the nature of sexual difference itself—debates that had often unexpected effects on the gay community’s rights and freedoms. Examining those battles, Vice Patrol enriches understandings of the regulation of queer life in the twentieth century and disputes about police power that continue today.
For more about the book, as well as links to her other publications, check out her personal website.
Prior to joining the faculty at HLS, Professor Lvovsky clerked for two federal appellate court judges, the Honorable Michael Boudin on the First Circuit and the Honorable Gerard E. Lynch on the Second Circuit Court, and then was an Academic Fellow at Columbia Law School. She received her J.D. and Ph.D. (History of American Civilization) from Harvard and her B.A. from Yale.
Welcome, Anna Lvovksy!
