Professor Anna Lvovsky from Harvard Law School will present her paper “When Anyone Can Tell: Liquor Laws, Gay Bars, and the Politics of Common Sense" at the Legal History Workshop.

Please contact Anna Gavin, agavin@law.upenn.edu, for a copy of the paper if you wish to attend.

Anna Lvovsky is an Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she teaches American legal history, the history of policing, criminal law, and evidence. Professor Lvovsky’s scholarship focuses on the legal and cultural dimensions of policing, judicial uses of professional knowledge, and the regulation of gender, sexuality, and morality. Her recent work examines judicial deference to police expertise and the role of moral judgment in the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.

Professor Lvovsky’s book project, Queer Expertise: Urban Policing and the Discovery of the Gay World, 1920-1970, under contract with the University of Chicago Press, examines how the police drew on a combination of scientific expertise and lay stereotype about homosexuality to shape the legal status of gay men in the United States. As a dissertation, the project received the 2016 Julien Mezey Dissertation Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities.

Prior to joining HLS, Professor Lvovsky was an Academic Fellow at Columbia Law School. She clerked for Judge Michael Boudin of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and for Judge Gerard E. Lynch of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Professor Lvovsky graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was articles co-chair of the Harvard Law Review and the recipient of the LGBTQ Writing Prize, and received her Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University. She earned a B.A. summa cum laude from Yale College.