LAURA T. KESSLER

Laura T. Kessler is the S.J. Quinney Chair and Professor of Law at the University of Utah. She teaches Civil Procedure, Family Law, Sexual Harassment Law, Employment Discrimination Law, and Reproductive Rights and Justice. Her research focuses on the legal regulation of sex, gender, and sexuality in various contexts.

Professor Kessler's scholarship has examined LGBTQ family rights, sex discrimination in the law of marriage and divorce, polygamy and religious freedom, multi-parent families, workplace sex and pregnancy discrimination, sexual misconduct in the military, access to contraception, and sterilization abuse. She an author of the case book Women and the Law (Libby Adler, Aziza Ahmed, Lisa Crooms, Laura Kessler & Rachel Rebouché eds., West Academic, forthcoming). Her recent works include Reproductive Justice at Work: Employment Law After Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 109 Cornell L. Rev. 1447 (2024) (exploring workers' vulnerabilities arising from the criminalization of abortion and the need for enhanced medical privacy and antiretaliation protections for workers post-Dobbs) and Miscarriage of Justice: Early Pregnancy Loss and the Limits of U.S. Employment Law, 108 Cornell L. Rev. 543 (2023) (addressing the invisibility of the common experience of miscarriage in federal employment discrimination law).

In pursuing her research, Professor Kessler draws on several methodologies, integrating legal analysis and social science methods such as survey research, structured interviews, content analysis of text, and systematic analysis of archival sources. She is a longtime member of the Law and Society Association, a group of scholars from many fields and countries interested in the place of law in social, political, economic, and cultural life.

Before entering academia, Professor Kessler clerked for the Honorable Ronald L. Ellis in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, litigated class-action civil rights cases for the ACLU of Maryland and Maryland Disability Law Center, and was a teaching fellow at Columbia Law School.