Elizabeth Katz is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Harvard University, where she specializes in U.S. legal history. Her research focuses on laws governing families, and her other interests include the history of the legal profession as well as the use of treaties and constitutions to secure women’s rights under international and foreign law.
Before coming to Harvard, Elizabeth received a JD (Order of the Coif) and MA in American Legal History from the University of Virginia School of Law. During law school Elizabeth served on the Virginia Law Review and as a teaching assistant for Legal Research & Writing, and she contributed to legal briefs as a member of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. Her master’s thesis, “How Automobile Accidents Stalled the Development of Interspousal Liability,” was published in the Virginia Law Review and selected by the faculty as the best Note in her graduating law school class. She next wrote a paper about the importance of including women in modern constitution drafting, which was awarded the University of Virginia’s Zora Neale Hurston Essay Award for the best graduate student paper focused on women or gender and was later published as a book chapter in Feminist Constitutionalism: Global Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2012). A third project she began in law school, which challenged existing understandings of the legal treatment of domestic violence in the early twentieth century, was selected for the Kathryn T. Preyer Scholar Award by the American Society for Legal History. An expanded version was published in the William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law.
After law school, Elizabeth clerked for the Honorable J. Frederick Motz on the United States District Court for the District of Maryland. She then worked as a litigation associate in the Washington, D.C. office of Covington & Burling for three years. At Covington she represented clients in matters including white collar, lawyer professional rules of conduct, and appellate litigation, and she advised several leading global technology companies regarding data privacy laws and compliance with electronic surveillance requests from U.S. and foreign law enforcement agencies. Elizabeth also completed a six-month pro bono rotation at Neighborhood Legal Services Program, where she represented low-income residents of the District of Columbia in divorce, custody, and child support cases.
Follow Elizabeth on Twitter @ElizabethDKatz.
Elizabeth’s law review publications are available for download here: http://ssrn.com/author=1543206