Marianne Constable has published broadly on a range of topics in interdisciplinary legal studies. Her book, Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (Stanford University Press, 2014), shows how legal utterances, in speech and writing, are forms of law-in-action. She is currently researching the “new unwritten law” that supposedly exonerated women who killed their husbands in Chicago a century ago, to explore the rhetoric of law and history. She also works on the written dialogue form, the rhetoric of environment and administration, and is interested in awareness and movement in relation to learning. Her books include Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law (2005) and The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changes in Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge (1994), winner of the Law & Society Association (LSA)'s J. Willard Hurst Prize in Legal History.
Constable is the author of articles on, among other topics, Foucault and immigration law, Nietzsche and jurisprudence, the rhetoric of “community,” the role of law in the liberal arts, Frederick Schauer on rules, Robert Cover on violence, Montesquieu on systems, Vico on legal education, and Arendt on the rhetoric of “sustainability.” For her views on the importance of rhetoric, see "When Words Cease to Matter."
Constable was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center (Spring 2019); the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (2013-14); and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2005-06). Her awards include the James Boyd White Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities, an NEH, and numerous mentoring prizes, including the 2024 LSA Wheeler Mentorship Award. She held the Zaffaroni Family Chair in Undergraduate Education 2009-2014, while also serving as Department Chair. On campus, she is affiliated with the Designated Emphases in Critical Theory and in Women and Gender Studies and with the Center for the Study of Law and Society. Since 2005, she has been a certified Feldenkrais Method (R) practitioner.
Education: PhD (Jurisprudence and Social Policy), JD, BA (Philosophy and Political Science), UC Berkeley
