2024-25 Hess Scholar-in-Residence

Melissa Murray

Melissa Murray

2024-25 Hess Scholar-in-Residence

The Wolfe Institute will be hosting events during the academic year to introduce Professor Murray to the campus community in anticipation of her residency from April 1 to April 4, 2025. During that week, the institute will host several public and private events with Professor Murray. Associate Professor Helen Georgas, from the Brooklyn College Library, has prepared a library guide with free electronic access to a selection of Murray’s work.

Biography

Melissa Murray is the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, where she teaches constitutional law, family law, criminal law, and reproductive rights and justice. She is a co-author (with Andrew Weissman) of the New York Times bestselling book The Trump Indictments: The Historic Charging Documents with Commentary. Murray’s writing has appeared in a range of legal and lay publications, including the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic. She is a legal analyst for MSNBC, and is a co-host of Strict Scrutiny, a Crooked Media podcast about the Supreme Court and legal culture.

Murray is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where she was a Jefferson Scholar and an Echols Scholar, and Yale Law School, where she was notes development editor of the Yale Law Journal. While in law school, she earned special recognition as an NAACP-LDF/Shearman & Sterling Scholar and was a semifinalist of Morris Tyler Moot Court.

Following law school, Murray clerked for Sonia Sotomayor, then of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Stefan Underhill of the US District Court for the District of Connecticut. Murray is a member of the New York bar.

At NYU Law, Murray teaches constitutional law, family law, criminal law, and reproductive rights and justice, among other courses. Murray’s research focuses on the legal regulation of sex and sexuality and encompasses such topics as marriage and its alternatives, the marriage equality debate, the legal recognition of caregiving, and reproductive rights and justice. Her publications have appeared (or are forthcoming) in the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, among others.

In addition to co-authoring The Trump Indictments with Andrew Weissman (2024), Professor Murray is co-author of the upcoming Feminist Jurisprudence (2024) and of Cases on Reproductive Rights and Justice, the first casebook to cover the field of reproductive rights and justice (2015; 2022). She is also co-editor of Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories (2019).

She has translated her scholarly writing for more popular audiences by publishing in the New York Times, Newsweek, the San Francisco Chronicle, Vanity Fair, and the Huffington Post, and has offered commentary for numerous media outlets, including NPR, MSNBC, and PBS.

In 2013, Murray’s article, “What’s So New About the New Illegitimacy?,” was awarded the Dukeminier Awards’ Michael Cunningham Prize as one of the best sexual orientation and gender identity law review articles of 2012. Her article, “Marriage as Punishment,” won the Association of American Law Schools’ 2010-2011 Scholarly Papers Competition for faculty members with fewer than five years of law teaching. “Marriage as Punishment” was also selected by the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Women in Legal Education as a winner of the 2010-2011 New Voices in Gender Studies scholarly paper competition. In 2010, Murray was awarded the Association of American Law School’s Derrick A. Bell Award, which is given to a junior faculty member who has made an extraordinary contribution to legal education, the legal system, or social justice. In 2011, Murray was elected to the membership of the American Law Institute.

Prior to joining the NYU faculty, Murray was on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she was the recipient of the Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction. From March 2016 to June 2017, she served as interim dean of the Berkeley Law School.