About

Mary is one of the world’s leading authorities on the legal history of the American abortion debate. She often shares her expertise with news outlets in the United States and around the world. She has consulted governors, submitted congressional testimony, and lectured to audiences in the United States and abroad. She is a 2023-2024 Guggenheim Fellow and Martin Luther King Professor of Law at UC Davis.

Her newest book, Personhood: The New War over Reproduction, will be published by Yale University Press in 2025. Personhood shows that the demise of Roe was never the ultimate goal of the antiabortion movement, which always fought for the recognition of constitutional fetal rights. In a sweeping history of the struggle for fetal rights from the 1960s to the present, she recasts the story of conservative constitutionalism in America.

Her most recent book, Roe: The History of a National Obsession, was published by Yale University Press in January 2023. The book considers why Americans have been preoccupied with Roe even after commentators across the ideological spectrum criticized it and the law moved beyond it.

Ziegler’s Dollars for Life: The Antiabortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment, was published by Yale in the summer of 2022. Dollars for Life traces how the battle to reverse Roe v. Wade changed the rules of campaign finance, doomed the GOP establishment, and made fundamental changes to American democracy.

Mary’s first three books offer a kaleidoscopic view of the history of American abortion law and politics. Her first, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate, published by Harvard University Press in 2015, mines the history of the decade after the Supreme Court’s landmark abortion decision, Roe v. Wade. After Roe won the Thomas J. Wilson Prize from Harvard University Press for best first manuscript.

Her second book, Beyond Abortion: Roe v. Wade and the Fight for Privacy, published by Harvard University Press in 2018, studies the forgotten legacy of Roe in debates about sexual liberty, gay and lesbian rights, the treatment of the mentally ill, consumer rights, data privacy, and the right to die.

In March of 2020, Cambridge University Press published her third book, Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present. Abortion and the Law offers a comprehensive legal history of the abortion debate, from the recognition of a right to choose to the likely undoing of Roe today. The book documents a consequential shift in the terms of the abortion debate—toward claims about the basic facts—that only deepened polarization.

She is also the author of Reproduction and the Constitution, which Routledge published as part of its seminar series in 2022, and the Research Handbook on International Abortion Law for Elgar Press.

Mary is currently working on the Original Meaning of Sex, which is under contract with Yale University Press. The book traces the transformation of the conservative legal movement, the ascendancy of a conservative Christian legal movement, and the fusion of longstanding social conservative arguments about sex and gender with claims about the history, tradition, and original meaning of the Constitution. By studying the evolution of arguments about sex, reproduction, and the separation of church and state from 1873 to the present, the book tells powerful story about the transformation of the courts and the health of the nation’s democracy. She is also co-authoring or revising forthcoming articles in the Michigan Law Review, the NYU Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal.

A native of Butte, Montana, Mary is a graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Law School. She lives in California with her family.