We are delighted to welcome Professor Marie-Amélie George to the blog for the month of October. Cribbing here from her Wake Forest Law faculty bio --
Marie-Amélie George specializes in LGBTQ rights and teaches courses on civil procedure and family law. As a historian, she analyzes both how and why laws have changed, as well as the ways in which history can provide insight into current legal debates and contemporary normative questions. Professor George's work has been published or is forthcoming in the Northwestern Law Review, Florida Law Review, Wisconsin Law Review, Alabama Law Review, Yale Law & Policy Review, Harvard Civil-Rights Civil-Liberties Law Review, and Law & History Review, among others. She is a three-time recipient of the Dukeminier Award, which recognizes the country's most influential sexual orientation and gender identity scholarship. In 2021, she received the law school's Jurist Excellence in Teaching Award.
Marie-Amélie George (WF Law)
Prior to joining the Wake faculty, Professor George was the Berger-Howe Fellow in Legal History at Harvard Law School. She also served as an Associate in Law at Columbia Law School, where she taught the Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic and a course on legal research and writing. Before entering academia, Professor George worked as a prosecutor at the Miami State Attorney's Office and as a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York.
Professor George received her Ph.D. in history with distinction from Yale University, and her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law and a Kent Scholar. She also holds a M.St. in Women's Studies from the University of Oxford, where she was awarded a distinction on her thesis.
George is also the author of the just-published Family Matters: Queer Households and the Half-Century Struggle for Legal Recognition (Cambridge University Press). About the book:
In 1960, consensual sodomy was a crime in every state in America.
Fifty-five years later, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples
had the fundamental right to marry. In the span of two generations,
American law underwent a dramatic transformation. Though the fight for
marriage equality has received a considerable amount of attention from
scholars and the media, it was only a small part of the more than
half-century struggle for queer family rights. Family Matters uncovers
these decades of advocacy, which reshaped the place of same-sex
sexuality in American law and society – and ultimately made marriage
equality possible. This book, however, is more than a history of queer
rights. Marie-Amélie George reveals that national legal change resulted
from shifts at the state and local levels, where the central figures
were everyday people without legal training. Consequently, she offers a
new way of understanding how minority groups were able to secure
meaningful legal change.
Advance praise for Family Matters:
"The legalization of same-sex marriage can only be understood as something that happened ‘fast’ by ignoring the critical history this book traces. Family Matters probes the ‘unknown decades’ of legal (and extra-legal) advocacy for LGBT families in the years before same-sex marriage. Among its many fascinating insights is the role that straight as well as gay families played. This is an expansive and important work of scholarship, and one that should be widely read." -- Margot Canaday
"Fluidly narrated and marvelously detailed, this is a history of ordinary people transforming law and culture bit by bit as they struggled to gain queer family rights. The book’s focus on the local and state level illuminates the surprising centrality of parent-child relationships in the gradual attainment of gay rights, long before marriage equality became possible." -- Nancy F. Cott - author of Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation
"Beginning with battles over the criminalization of queer life and ending with the recognition of same-sex marriage, this important and ambitious book tracks an extraordinary transformation in American law. Family Matters offers an incisive analysis of one of the most consequential shifts in the legal landscape of the last half-century." -- Regina Kunzel
Look out for a series of posts from Professor George over the next several weeks.
-- Karen Tani
