Mary L. Dudziak
Visiting Professor of Law
John Hope Franklin Professor of American Legal History
Mary L. Dudziak is visiting in the fall 2011 semester from the University of Southern California where she is the Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science. She is a legal historian whose research focuses on international approaches to legal history and the impact of war on American democracy. She has written extensively about the impact of foreign affairs on civil rights policy during the Cold War and other topics in 20th-century American legal history. Dudziak teaches the 20th Century Constitutional History, Law and War in the 20th Century (seminar), Constitutional Law, Equality and Liberty, Comparative Constitutional Law, Constitutional Politics in Africa, and a seminar on Law and Social Change in Post-1945 America.
Dudziak is the author of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, forthcoming in January 2012 from Oxford University Press; Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey (Oxford University Press, 2008)(paperback Princeton University Press 2011); and Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2000, 2nd ed. 2011). She is editor of September 11 in History: A Watershed Moment? (Duke University Press, 2003); and co-editor (with Leti Volpp) of Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders, a special issue of American Quarterly (September 2005), reissued by Johns Hopkins University Press in March 2006. Her next book, under contract with Oxford University Press, is How War Made America: A 20th Century History. Her newest article is "Law, War, and the History of Time" (California Law Review 2010), and she is Contributing Editor for a special issue of the Organization of American Historians Magazine of History for the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Other works on civil rights history and 20th-century constitutional history have appeared in numerous law reviews and other journals. She founded the Legal History Blog and contributes to Balkinization.
Dudziak received her A.B. from the University of California, Berkeley, and her J.D., M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Prior to joining USC Law in 1998, she was a law clerk for Judge Sam J. Ervin, III, of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and a professor of law and history at the University of Iowa. She has visited at Harvard Law School, and has been a Distinguished Visitor at the University of Maryland. She has held elected positions in the American Society for Legal History, the Law and Society Association and the American Studies Association. She also serves as a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Her many fellowships have included fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, and she has been a member of the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
