Anna Lvovsky

Biography

Anna Lvovsky is an Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where she teaches American legal history, the history of policing, evidence, and criminal law. Professor Lvovsky’s scholarship focuses on the legal and cultural dimensions of policing, judicial uses of professional knowledge, and the regulation of gender and sexuality. Her articles have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and the Journal of Urban History.

Professor Lvovsky’s first book, Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle over Urban Gay Life before Stonewall, was published in 2021 by the University of Chicago Press. Vice Patrol has received the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies and was the 2021 finalist for the David J. Langum Sr. Prize in American legal history. As a dissertation, the project received the Julien Mezey Dissertation Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities.

Prior to joining HLS, Professor Lvovsky was an Academic Fellow at Columbia Law School. She clerked for Judge Michael Boudin of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and for Judge Gerard E. Lynch of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Professor Lvovsky graduated magna cum laude 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. She earned a B.A. summa cum laude from Yale College.

Areas of Interest

• Criminal Law and Procedure
• Criminal Law and Procedure: Problems of United States Law Enforcement
• Evidence
• Evidence: Expert Evidence
• Legal History: Twentieth Century American Legal History
• Sexuality and the Law
• Legal History