Anna Lvovsky

Anna Lvovsky is the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law and an Affiliate Professor of History at Harvard University. At the Law School, she teaches courses on American legal history, evidence, and the history of policing.

Professor Lvovsky’s scholarship focuses on covert police tactics, the regulation of gender and sexuality, and the role of expertise in court. Her first book, Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall, won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies, was the 2021 finalist for the Langum Prize in American legal history, and received an honorable mention for the 2023 Boswell Prize by the Committee on LGBT History. Her articles have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Journal of Urban History, and the Law and History Review. She is currently working on a book on the history of undercover detection in the United States.

Prior to joining HLS, Professor Lvovsky was an Academic Fellow at Columbia Law School. She clerked for Judge Michael Boudin of the First Circuit Court of Appeals and Judge Gerard E. Lynch of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Professor Lvovsky graduated from Harvard Law School, where she was articles co-chair of the Harvard Law Review and the recipient of the LGBTQ Writing Prize, and received her Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University.