Mary Ziegler is an expert on the law, history, and politics of reproduction, health care, and conservatism in the United States from 1945 to the present. She is one of the world’s leading historians of the U.S. abortion debate. 

She is the author of four books on social movement struggles around reproduction, autonomy, and the law, including Abortion and the Law in America: A Legal History, Roe v. Wade to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Beyond Abortion: Roe v. Wade and the Fight for Privacy (Harvard University Press, 2018), the award-winning After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate (Harvard University Press, 2015), which won the Harvard University Press Thomas J. Wilson Prize for best first manuscript in any discipline, and Reproduction and the Constitution (Routledge, 2022). Her new book, Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment, is appearing with Yale in 2022.  

She is a graduate of Harvard College (2004) and Harvard Law School (2007). Before coming to Davis, she was a professor at Florida State University College of Law, where she won several teaching awards, and the Daniel P.S. Paul Visiting Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Atlantic, PBS Newshour, CNN, and the Washington Post. 

She is working on a history of the nation’s fixation with Roe v. Wade for Yale University Press and editing a comparative volume on the laws of abortion around the world for Elgar Press.