Elizabeth W. Sepper

Professor Elizabeth Sepper is a nationally recognized scholar of religious liberty, health law, and equality. She has written extensively about conflicts over reproductive healthcare and religion. Her work also focuses on constitutional, theoretical, and policy debates about the antidiscrimination obligations of public accommodations—that is, businesses, social service providers, and membership organizations that are open to the public. Her recent work documents and evaluates the growth of state-religious hospitals, schools, prisons, and social services--a new era of establishment of religion.

Professor Sepper’s articles appear in top journals, including the Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, and Harvard Journal of Gender & Law. Her article, Doctoring Discrimination in the Same-Sex Marriage Debates, on the issue of religious objections to gay rights won multiple awards, including the 2014 Dukeminier Award for best sexuality law scholarship. She is the editor of Law, Religion, and Health in the United States (Holly Fernandez Lynch, I. Glenn Cohen, & Elizabeth Sepper, eds. Cambridge Univ. 2017).

Sepper received her B.A. in History magna cum laude with distinction from Boston University. She received her LL.M. and J.D. magna cum laude from New York University School of Law, where she served as an notes editor of New York University Law Review. Following law school, she clerked for the Hon. Marjorie Rendell of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, practiced human rights law with a focus on women’s rights, and was a Center for Reproductive Rights fellow at Columbia Law School.  Prior to joining the Texas faculty, she was a professor at Washington University School of Law. During 2018-19, she held the LAPA/Crane Fellowship in the Law and Public Affairs Program at Princeton University to work on a project entitled Sex in Public, which explores the history of sex discrimination in public accommodations.