The Law & Society Association has announced its 2026 awards, including the winner of the James Willard Hurst Book Prize ("awarded annually (biennially prior to 2002) for the best work in socio-legal history published in the previous year").
This year's Hurst award went to Serena Mayeri (Penn Carey Law), for Marital Privilege: Marriage, Inequality, and the Transformation of American Law (Oxford University Press, 2025). The citation:
Serena Mayeri’s Marital Privilege shows how, beginning in the
1960s, marriage was dislodged from its supreme position across a range
of legal domains and replaced with a regime of “marital privilege.” With
poignant, empathetic detail drawn from archives and legal
documents, Mayeri brings to life both well-known and not-so-famous
cases, revealing the theories and evolving strategies animating a wide
range of challengers to the regime of marital supremacy—from litigants
to advocacy organizations to legal academics. Yet, even as their
victories advanced the values of nondiscrimination and individual
autonomy, Mayeri shows how the assumptions of the new regime of “marital
privilege” obscured and deepened inequalities of wealth, power, and
privilege in American law and society. Combining sweeping ambition,
doctrinal acumen, and a keen sense of historical contingency, Marital Privilege provides a magisterial account of a crucial transformation of American law.
Congratulations to Professor Mayeri!
-- Karen Tani
