Sarah Barringer Gordon

Former Fellow, 2002-2003
University of Pennsylvania Law School

University of Pennsylvania Law School, 3400 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia PA 19103
sgordon@law.upenn.edu
phone: 215-898-3069 ; fax: 215-573-2025
Website

While at LAPA
Sarah Barringer Gordon is a legal historian who specializes in the history of religion in America. She is a professor of law and history at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches property, religious history, and courses on church and state. She has published work on blasphemy, women's suffrage, law and literature, and is the author of The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Gordon holds a bachelor's degree from Vassar College, a J.D. and a Masters in Divinity from Yale, and a Ph.D. in history from Princeton. While at Princeton, she will begin work on a new book project, investigating the litigation practices of religious organizations in the twentieth century, and their important role in the tectonic shift in the understanding of what it means to exercise freedom and bear rights. She also will teach a course: "Resurgence and Rebirth: American Religion and Legal Change in the Twentieth Century."

Life after LAPA
Sarah Barringer Gordon is the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her book, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), won the Mormon History Association's and The Utah Historical Society's Best Book awards in 2003.

She is currently working on a new book about religion and law in the twentieth century, titled The Spirit of the Law, which will be published by Harvard University Press. She is the recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships and spent the 2004-05 academic year at University College London. Gordon also served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the Law School from 2000-2002, and is on the advisory boards of the National Constitution Center, the American Society for Legal History, Vassar College, and the Mormon History Association. She holds a secondary appointment in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches American religious and constitutional history.