LAURA E GÓMEZ
Professor of American Studies and Law

Laura E. Gómez teaches and writes in the broad areas of law, race, and gender. Her book Misconceiving Mothers: Legislators, Prosecutors and the Politics of Prenatal Drug Exposure (Temple University Press, 1997) explored how politics and the media shaped debates among members and sub-groups of the medical and legal professions in the late 1980s as they constructed and responded to “the crack baby” problem.

She currently is writing a book about the primary role of law, legal actors, and legal discourse during the early years of the American colonization of the Southwest. She will argue that reinterpreting this period of New Mexico history is crucial for understanding the evolution of race and ethnicity in the Southwest, in the nineteenth-century U.S. (and, particularly, how we understand colonialism in the context of the Civil War and federal Indian policy), and even the twenty-first-century trajectory of race in the U.S. Manifest Destinies is under advance contract with New York University Press.

Gómez will be appointed both in the American Studies Department and at the School of Law. In American Studies, she will teach “Race and the Law in American History and Contemporary Society,” which will explore law’s role in both perpetuating and ameliorating racial inequality. She also will advise graduate students, with a special emphasis on those in the Race, Class and Ethnicity, Gender Studies, and Southwest Studies clusters.

From 1994 thru 2005, Gómez was a member of the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles, where she held a joint appointment at the School of Law and in the Sociology Department. She has held fellowships at the School of American Research (2004-05) and the Stanford Humanities Center (1996-97). Gómez received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University (1994), her J.D. from Stanford Law School (1992), and her A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard College (1986). She grew up in Albuquerque’s North Valley, where she attended APS schools.

Publications

Misconceiving Mothers: Legislators, Prosecutors and the Politics of Prenatal Drug Exposure (Temple University Press, 1997).

Courses

Race and the Law in American History and Contemporary Society

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