Mark S. Weiner

Mark S. Weiner has been a Fulbright fellow in both Iceland and Austria and is the author of three award-winning books about the relation between government and individual freedom and issues of race and American citizenship. An advocate for public legal education, he teaches Constitutional Law, Free Speech, History of the Common Law, and Church-State Relations.

Professor Weiner holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University. He received his A.B. from Stanford University, where he graduated with honors and distinction and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He is the author of three award-winning books recognized both for their contributions to scholarship and their accessible style. He received a Board of Trustees Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence in 2006, and in 2009-10 he was the Chancellor's Distinguished Research Scholar.

Professor Weiner's most recent book, The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals about the Future of Individual Freedom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), received the 2015 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. His second book, Americans without Law: The Racial Boundaries of Citizenship (NYU Press, 2006), received the President's Book Award of the Social Science History Association. His first book, Black Trials: Citizenship From the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), received a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association for its impact on the public understanding of law. Professor Weiner also received a yearlong fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for Black Trials.

In the spring of 2015, Professor Weiner was a Fulbright scholar in the Department of Legal Philosophy at the University of Salzburg, Austria, where he taught U.S. Constitutional Law and a course about Law and Genre in American Film. While in Austria, he also began producing his own film about the relation between Austrian concepts of law and the Austrian experience of landscape. In the fall of 2009, he was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Akureyri, Iceland, where he studied the history of Icelandic law and its relation to the Germanic legal tradition. He has lectured and taught extensively about U.S. constitutional law throughout Germany.

Professor Weiner has been a visiting professor at Cardozo School of Law and the University of Connecticut School of Law. He produced a major exhibition "Law's Picture Books" about illustrated law books with co-curator Mike Widener, rare book librarian at Yale Law School, for the Grollier Club in New York. He also produces video essays about historical and humanistic legal subjects, and recently formed his own production company, Hidden Cabinet Films. He is a member of the Advisory Commission to the Standing Committee for Public Education of the American Bar Association.

Professor Weiner lives in Connecticut with his wife, Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, a professor of 19th-century British literature at Wesleyan University. In his spare time, Professor Weiner enjoys hiking and spending time outdoors. He is a certified Wilderness Emergency Medical Technician and a licensed EMT.