Sara Mayeux

Assistant Professor of Law
Assistant Professor of History

Sara Mayeux researches and writes on criminal law and procedure, constitutional law, and American legal history. Before joining Vanderbilt’s law faculty in 2016, she was a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, before which she was the Berger-Howe Legal History Fellow at Harvard Law School. Mayeux’s doctoral dissertation, titled Poor Defenses: The American Legal Profession and the Problem of the "Indigent Accused" in the Twentieth Century, draws on previously untapped archives to reconstruct the history of public defenders’ offices and, more generally, of American lawyers’ efforts to theorize and institutionalize a right to state-provided criminal defense. After earning her law degree at Stanford, she clerked for Judge Marsha S. Berzon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit before entering the legal academy.

Courses:

• Constitutional Law II - Individual Rights (8040)
• First Amendment Constitutional Law (7204)
• Law and History (9100)