Professor Ziegler Elected to the American Law Institute
Professor Mary Ziegler has been elected to the American Law Institute, the nation’s premier nongovernmental law reform organization.
UC Davis Law now counts 21 current and nine emeriti faculty in the ALI, which consists of judges, lawyers and law professors and caps membership at 3,000.
It has been a year of accolades for Ziegler, a Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law, Guggenheim Fellow and one of the world’s foremost experts on the law, history and politics of reproduction, health care and conservatism in the United States.
In April, she received the second-ever award for Contributions to Public Policy from the Organization of American Historians. In July, Ziegler was named a UC Davis Chancellor’s Leadership Professor, a five-year appointment that includes $25,000 in research support funds per academic year.
A UC Davis Law faculty member since 2022, Ziegler is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including Personhood: The New Civil War over Reproduction, which drew national attention upon its release in 2025 and became the subject of UC Davis Law Review Online’s inaugural symposium. Ziegler’s 2015 book After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate won the Harvard University Press Thomas J. Wilson Prize for best first manuscript in any discipline.
Ziegler’s articles have appeared or are forthcoming in leading legal, medical, and public health journals, including the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, NYU Law Review, UCLA Law Review and Yale Law Journal. She is the nation’s fifth-most cited legal scholar writing about health, according to HeinOnline.
Among the most sought-after legal commentators on reproductive rights, Ziegler or her work have appeared on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, PBS and NPR and in the New York Times, Washington Post and The Atlantic.
Ziegler has advised governors and members of Congress, submitted congressional testimony on questions involving reproduction, and served on the committee of scholars charged with helping create a museum of U.S. Women’s History.
Before coming to Davis, Ziegler served as the Daniel P.S. Paul Visiting Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School and the Stearns Weaver Miller Professor at Florida State University School of Law.
Ziegler holds a J.D. and B.A. from Harvard.