Sally Gordon is well known for her work on religion in American public life and the law of church and state, especially for the ways that religious liberty developed over the course of American national history. She is a frequent commentator in news media on the constitutional law of religion and debates about religious freedom.
In 2015-16, Gordon was a Guggenheim Fellow, and in fall 2017 held the Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress. Gordon has also served as the President of the American Society for Legal History, and serves as co-editor of Studies in Legal History, the book series of the Society. She serves on the boards of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation and the McDowell-Hartman Foundation, as well as the University of Pennsylvania Press. In 2011, she received the University’s Lindback Award for distinguished teaching and in 2004 and 2009 the Law School’s Robert A. Gorman Award for Teaching Excellence. In 2012, she was appointed a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.
Her first book, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth- Century America (Univ. of North Carolina, 2002), won the Mormon History Association’s and the Utah Historical Society’s best book awards. Her second book, The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Harvard, 2010), explores the world of church and state in the 20th century. Her current book projects are Freedom’s Holy Light: Disestablishment in America, 1776-1876, as well as The Long Road to Freedom: Biddy Mason and the Making of Black Los Angeles, co-authored with Kevin A. Waite. The book is part of a multimedia National Endowment for the Humanities funded project that explores the life of Biddy Mason.
Gordon holds a B.A. degree from Vassar College, J.D. from Yale Law School, M.A.R. in Ethics from the Yale Divinity School, and a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University.
Sally is an avid hiker and lives in Philadelphia with her husband, Dan, and their dogs.
