Georgetown Law Professor Emerita Wendy W. Williams and former Georgetown Law Professor Richard H. Chused have published Gendered Law in American History (Carolina Academic Press, August 2016).

Georgetown Law Professor Emerita Wendy Williams

The 1250-page textbook is the result of more than 30 years of scholarship, mostly at Georgetown Law. Williams and Chused, now a professor at New York Law School, began teaching a course in Gender and American Legal History in the early 1980s that continued for more than 20 years.

Hundreds of Georgetown Law students produced papers regarding the legal history of gender from the founding days of the Republic through the 1970s. The papers are available at Georgetown Law’s Edward Bennett Williams Law Library.

“I am pleased that the hard work of Wendy and Richard, and many of our students, has paid off in such a rewarding fashion,” said Georgetown Law Dean William M. Treanor. “Many scholars will benefit from this book.”

New York Law School, Former Georgetown Law Professor Richard Chused

Gendered Law in American History explores an array of social, cultural and legal arenas from the turn of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries, including concepts of citizenship at the founding of the republic, the development of married women’s property laws, divorce, child custody, temperance, suffrage, domestic and racial violence before and after the Civil War, protective labor legislation and the use of legal history testimony in legal disputes. It is both an invaluable reference tool and an important new teaching text.

Williams, who joined the faculty in 1976 and also served as associate dean of Georgetown Law from 1989 to 1993, is best known for her work in the area of gender and law, especially concerning issues of work and family. She is a coauthor of a casebook on sex discrimination and law and most recently, with Adjunct Professor Mary Hartnett (L’85), joined Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in producing My Own Words, a compendium of the speeches and writings of Justice Ginsburg. She is currently working on a biography of the Justice with Hartnett. Williams also helped draft and testified before congressional committees on the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 and the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, and served as the president of the Society of American Law Teachers.

Chused, who taught at Georgetown Law for 35 years, is an expert on copyright law and related subjects, property law and its history, and gender and law in American history. He joined the New York Law School faculty in 2008. During 2004–05, he received a Senior Scholar Fulbright Grant to teach at the Law Faculty of The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. From 2009 to 2011 he served on a Peer Review Committee that made recommendations on grant applications for the Fulbright Program in the Middle East. Chused is also a member of various history and legal history associations.

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