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Happy to announce my latest co-authored piece with Naomi Cahn and Maxine Eichner, For Their Benefit: The Lost History of Parental Consent and Minors' Rights, will be published in the California Law Review. We haven't posted on SSRN yet but will soon!

Honored to be among the historians writing a first cut on Biden for @princetonucpress (edited by Julian Zelizer). Jennifer Schuessler does a great job of capturing the strange task we face in writing about Biden in what she aptly calls the Age of Trump: nytimes.com/2025/02/26/art…

By some strange coincidence, Reva Siegel and I were together yesterday when Comstockery published. Thanks to everyone at the Yale Law Journal for their help, and for everyone who read and commented on the paper! yalelawjournal.org

Excited to be part of this excellent volume of the The Yale Law Journal, and thanks to everyone who commented on or helped to edit Comstockery.

What's surprising is how long this took. I expect we'll see more of the same in the months to come: the Trump Administration slowly and without fanfare adopting the positions abortion opponents want, even on issues, like this, that won't play well politically.

This is in line with what the admin has done so far: investigating, a la RFK. It was hard to tell if this was just slow-walking, but increasingly, I think review will mean new restrictions. The q for me is whether the Trump DOJ will treat the Comstock Act as a ban.

Thanks, Lawrence Solum for recommending my latest with Dov Fox, which is forthcoming in Columbia Law Review. We're not just editing it but also working on a book-length legal history of IVF, and so welcome comments.

My new book, Personhood, is out a week from tomorrow. Thanks to Margaret Talbot for this generous @newyorker.com review. Hope you enjoy the book! newyorker.com/magazine/2025/…

Thanks The New York Times.com for featuring Personhood in the list of new books to watch in today's print edition. "Ziegler, a leading historian of abortion, looks beyond Roe v. Wade to the future battleground for reproductive rights." You can pre-order here: buff.ly/V6YwuE

Thanks to NPR for naming Personhood the book of the day. npr.org/2025/05/08/124… You can pick up a copy here or at your bookstore: .org/2025/05/08/1249919764/nprs-book-of-the-day-mary-ziegler-personhood

Investigation has been a defining policy on abortion. At first, this was to buy time, given that the issue hurts the GOP. Now it looks like political cover. Trump's past talk of state's rights will be portrayed as sincere; he will say that new data have changed his mind.

AP's reporting on GA may confuse readers. It says pro-lifers are divided on personhood bills. That's true of bills authorizing punishment of women but NOT of the idea of personhood, which is what is driving events in Georgia. This isn't an outlier. apnews.com/article/pregna…

The GA AG claims that Adriana Smith doesn't have to be on life support bc taking her off wouldn't qualify as a "direct abortion" and violate the state's ban. But that's wrong because GA's law is a *fetal personhood* law. Want to learn more? I have a book! amazon.com/Personhood-New…

Thanks to The Gospel Coalition and Daniel K. Williams for this fair and thoughtful review of Personhood. Hope @tgc readers find it if interest!

This bill was a model for other states. My guess is that it was taken down by its language blocking state courts from ruling on its constitutionality. Don't be surprised if many of these proposals are back, minus that idea. 19thnews.org/2025/05/texas-…

Striking story: a man accused of putting abortion pills into his girlfriend's drink without her consent is being charged not with abortion but with capital murder in Texas. A test for personhood politics in the state. star-telegram.com/news/local/cri…

Look at how much work the Court's abortion cases do here. The majority cites Dobbs to say that regulating a medical condition/procedure isn't sex discrimination, and another abortion case, Gonzales, to say that legislatures deserve discretion when there is scientific uncertainty.

Medina on its own will likely harder for plaintiffs to enforce other civil rights in federal court. And as far as Planned Parenthood and comparable providers are concerned, this case could be part of a one-two punch if Trump's Big Beautiful Bill passes.