Georgetown Law

Naomi Mezey has been a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center since 1998. She has served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and as Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Transnational Legal Studies in London. Mezey is a co-founder of the Georgetown Gender⁺ Justice Initiative, a university-wide center supporting research and community engagement on intersectional issues of gender and related forms of inequality. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Melbourne, IDC Herzliya in Tel Aviv, and the University of Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Mezey teaches civil procedure, legislation, jurisprudence, gender & sexuality, and seminars on law & popular culture and nationalism & cultural identity. She was award the Frank F. Flegal Teaching Award in 2013.

Mezey’s interdisciplinary scholarship helped to create the field of law, culture, and humanities. Her research brings together law and cultural studies to focus on the legal regulation of racial, sexual, gender, and national identities. She also writes on film and visuality, cultural property, maternalism, bisexuality, legal violence, and sovereignty. Her work has been widely anthologized and her article on the erasure and recognition of race in the US census was selected for the Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum. Mezey is currently working on a research collaboration on the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements with Georgetown’s Massive Data Institute as well as a book project about nationalism and secession with a focus on Catalonia’s recent attempt to gain independence from Spain.

Mezey serves on the Organizing Committee of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities and is a co-founder and co-convener of the Columbia, Georgetown, USC, UCLA, Penn & Stanford Law & Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop. She sits on the Advisory Board of the International Journal of Law in Context and serves as an Academic Advisor to the Life of the Law Podcast.

Mezey earned a B.A. from Wesleyan University, a M.A. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School, where she held a public interest fellowship and served as an articles editor for the Stanford Law Review. Mezey was a law clerk for Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California and prior to law school worked as a Legislative Aide to the late Senator Alan Cranston.

Courses:
Civil Procedure, Gender & Sexuality, Legal Justice, Lawmaking, Nationalisms, States & Cultural Identity