Individual Scholar Page

Personal Info

Photo

About Me

Associate Professor Elizabeth D. Katz is a legal historian whose work focuses on family law, criminal law, the legal profession, and the operation of state courts. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the University of Chicago Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, and the William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law. She teaches first-year criminal law, family law, and a seminar on the law’s treatment of race and religion in family contexts, historically and today.

Professor Katz’s research has been supported by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Early Career Scholar Fellowship awarded by the American Society for Legal History; an Albert J. Beveridge Grant from the American Historical Association; the Carrie Chapman Catt Center’s Prize for Research on Women and Politics; a fellowship and grant from Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies; and a fellowship in the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s History and Public Policy Initiative in the Ash Center for Democratic Governance. In 2009, the American Society for Legal History named Professor Katz a Kathryn T. Preyer Scholar.

Professor Katz received a B.A., M.A., and J.D. from the University of Virginia and will receive her Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in November 2019. After law school, she clerked for Judge J. Frederick Motz on the United States District Court for the District of Maryland. She then worked as a litigation associate at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. At Covington, she represented clients in matters including white collar crime and legal ethics at the trial and appellate levels and advised global technology companies regarding data privacy laws and compliance with electronic surveillance requests from U.S. and foreign law enforcement agencies. Professor Katz also participated in Covington’s six-month pro bono rotation at Neighborhood Legal Services Program, where she represented low-income residents of D.C. in divorce, custody, and child support cases. Immediately prior to joining Washington University Law, she was the inaugural fellow in Stanford Law School’s Center for Law and History.

Recent Publications

“Racial and Religious Democracy”: Identity and Equality in Mid-Century Courts, 72 Stan. L. Rev. (forthcoming June 2020).

“A Woman Stumps Her State”: Nellie G. Robinson and Women’s Right to Hold Public Office in Ohio, 53 Akron L. Rev. 313 (2019) (contribution to conference symposium on 19th Amendment).

Criminal Law in a Civil Guise: The Evolution of Family Courts and Support Laws, 86 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1241 (2019).

Judicial Patriarchy and Domestic Violence: A Challenge to the Conventional Family Privacy Narrative, 21 Wm. & Mary J. Women & L. 379 (2015).

Women’s Involvement in International Constitution-Making, in Feminist Constitutionalism: Global Perspectives 204 (Beverly Baines, Daphne Barak-Erez, & Tsvi Kahana, eds., 2012).

How Automobile Accidents Stalled the Development of Interspousal Liability, 94 Va. L. Rev. 1213 (2008).

Media Coverage

Social Media

@elizabethdkatz

Country Focus

United States

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

19th century, 20th century

Expertise by Topic

Family, Gender, Government, Law, Politics, Race, Religion, Women