Serena Mayeri, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History (by courtesy), is the recipient of the Law and Society Association’s J. Willard Hurst Book Prize for 2026. The prize recognizes her book, Marital Privilege: Marriage, Inequality, and the Transformation of American Law (Yale University Press, 2025).
Awarded annually for the best work in socio-legal history published in the previous year, the Hurst Prize recognizes scholarship that illuminates the interrelationship between law and society, including the ways legal institutions shape and are shaped by social, political, and economic change.
Marital Privilege traces how, beginning in the 1960s, advocates and ordinary Americans transformed the legal primacy of marriage—the dense web of laws that had long tied rights, benefits, and protections to marital status—into a regime Mayeri describes as “marital privilege.”
Drawing on archival research, legal documents, and historical case studies, Mayeri brings to life both landmark and lesser-known cases that reshaped American family law and public policy. She traces the theories and evolving strategies of litigants, advocacy organizations, legal scholars, and social movements that challenged marital supremacy, while also examining how reforms intended to advance equality and individual autonomy could simultaneously reinforce disparities of wealth, power, and access.
The Law and Society Association praised the work in its award announcement. “Combining sweeping ambition, doctrinal acumen, and a keen sense of historical contingency, Marital Privilege provides a magisterial account of a crucial transformation of American law,” the committee wrote.
“I have long admired the scholarship the Hurst Prize recognizes, so to be in the company of scholars who have received this award is especially meaningful to me,” Mayeri said.
The prize is one of 15 annual awards through which the Law and Society Association honors scholars for groundbreaking publications and significant contributions to the study of law and society.
Mayeri’s scholarship focuses on constitutional law, legal history, reproductive rights and justice, and equality law in the United States. Her first book, Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2011), received the Littleton-Griswold Prize from the American Historical Association and the Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians.
https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/news/18541-j-willard-hurst-book-prize-for-2026
