We are delighted to welcome Professor Marie-Amélie George to the blog for the month of October. Cribbing here from her Wake Forest Law faculty bio — 

Marie-Amélie George (WF Law)

Marie-Amélie George specializes in LGBTQ rights and teaches courses on
civil procedure and family law. As a historian, she analyzes both how
and why laws have changed, as well as the ways in which history can
provide insight into current legal debates and contemporary normative
questions. Professor George’s work has been published or is forthcoming
in the Northwestern Law Review, Florida Law Review, Wisconsin Law
Review, Alabama Law Review, Yale Law & Policy Review, Harvard
Civil-Rights Civil-Liberties Law Review, and Law & History Review,
among others. She is a three-time recipient of the Dukeminier Award,
which recognizes the country’s most influential sexual orientation and
gender identity scholarship. In 2021, she received the law school’s
Jurist Excellence in Teaching Award.

Prior to joining the
Wake faculty, Professor George was the Berger-Howe Fellow in Legal
History at Harvard Law School. She also served as an Associate in Law at
Columbia Law School, where she taught the Sexuality and Gender Law
Clinic and a course on legal research and writing. Before entering
academia, Professor George worked as a prosecutor at the Miami State
Attorney’s Office and as a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind,
Wharton & Garrison in New York.

Professor George received
her Ph.D. in history with distinction from Yale University, and her J.D.
from Columbia Law School, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia
Journal of Gender and Law and a Kent Scholar. She also holds a M.St. in
Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford, where she was awarded a
distinction on her thesis.

George is also the author of the just-published Family Matters: Queer Households and the Half-Century Struggle for Legal Recognition (Cambridge University Press). About the book:

In 1960, consensual sodomy was a crime in every state in America.
Fifty-five years later, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples
had the fundamental right to marry. In the span of two generations,
American law underwent a dramatic transformation. Though the fight for
marriage equality has received a considerable amount of attention from
scholars and the media, it was only a small part of the more than
half-century struggle for queer family rights. Family Matters uncovers
these decades of advocacy, which reshaped the place of same-sex
sexuality in American law and society – and ultimately made marriage
equality possible. This book, however, is more than a history of queer
rights. Marie-Amélie George reveals that national legal change resulted
from shifts at the state and local levels, where the central figures
were everyday people without legal training. Consequently, she offers a
new way of understanding how minority groups were able to secure
meaningful legal change.

Advance praise for Family Matters:

“The legalization of same-sex
marriage can only be understood as something that happened ‘fast’ by
ignoring the critical history this book traces. Family Matters probes
the ‘unknown decades’ of legal (and extra-legal) advocacy for LGBT
families in the years before same-sex marriage. Among its many
fascinating insights is the role that straight as well as gay families
played. This is an expansive and important work of scholarship, and one
that should be widely read.” — Margot Canaday

“Fluidly narrated and
marvelously detailed, this is a history of ordinary people transforming
law and culture bit by bit as they struggled to gain queer family
rights. The book’s focus on the local and state level illuminates the
surprising centrality of parent-child relationships in the gradual
attainment of gay rights, long before marriage equality became
possible.” — Nancy F. Cott – author of Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation

“Beginning with battles over
the criminalization of queer life and ending with the recognition of
same-sex marriage, this important and ambitious book tracks an
extraordinary transformation in American law. Family Matters offers an
incisive analysis of one of the most consequential shifts in the legal
landscape of the last half-century.” — Regina Kunzel

Look out for a series of posts from Professor George over the next several weeks.

— Karen Tani