by Amanda Malone
Bernadette Meyler ‘06 (Ph.D. English) is currently the Carl and Sheila Spaeth Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life at Stanford Law School, as well as Professor, by courtesy, of English at Stanford University.
If it sounds like Meyler’s day has many acts, that’s because it does: As a faculty member, her work involves both teaching and research on a combination of law and humanities topics. She’s currently co-editing a volume on law and performance, and planning to edit a volume of comparative common laws. She plays a role in helping J.D.-Ph.D. and Ph.D. students determine their academic trajectory through the Legal Studies Workshop, the Sallyanne Payton Fellows program and as an advisor.
Meyler has also increasingly taken part in university administration. As of this year, she serves as special advisor to the provost on university speech – a position which involves thinking about how policies can protect the greatest possible freedom of speech on campus while ensuring the continuation of campus activities.
Behind the scenes: an interest in law begins to hold court
Despite Meyler’s clarity of purpose today, her interest in law didn’t always take center stage. “I had basically decided I was never going to go to law school, because both of my parents were lawyers,” she says. But that decision changed as she finished her bachelor’s degree at Harvard University and began her Ph.D. in English at UC Irvine. “While I was at Irvine, it was really the classes there that prompted me to become interested in law,” she says. A teaching assistantship for Brook Thomas’s course on citizenship led to a curiosity about the legal genre; philosopher Jacques Derrida’s seminar on perjury and pardon, together with a seminar by Julia Lupton – Meyler’s advisor – became the foundation for her dissertation.
Following her newfound curiosities, Meyler enrolled at Stanford Law School, where she had planned to spend a year studying legal history and left with a law degree and an interest in constitutional law – a focus of her teaching and research today. In an interim year off, she also completed her Ph.D. dissertation. After law school, she worked for a federal judge, then took an academic law position at Cornell University before arriving at Stanford Law School, where she continues an affiliation with humanities departments. “That was my trajectory,” she says of her surprising career transformations. “It was really quite circumstantial. It wasn’t planned out.”
Dramatic entrances: how humanities J.D.-Ph.D.s can forge exciting careers
For students with interdisciplinary interests like Meyler, the J.D.-Ph.D. holds out exciting possibilities – whether the dual degree was part of their plan or a product of circumstance. What’s special about the J.D.-Ph.D., Meyler says, is that, “Every person has to define their own field of study and forge their own pathway. It’s both very interesting intellectually, and can present challenges, because you have to be a pioneer in your discipline.” Students must think through the question of the connection between the disciplines and determine their own answer.
The J.D.-Ph.D. also opens up a range of career opportunities for graduates, from legal practice to law teaching, to academic jobs in the humanities, to public humanities and public scholarship.
Important dialogue: legal history speaks to our historical moment
Meyler’s research also offers a distinct perspective on our present moment. “Oftentimes what I feel like I can contribute best is informed by historical perspective,” she says. Recently, for example, she has commented on Trump’s pardons. “My book, which came out of my dissertation, is on pardoning in the 17th century in England. There are a lot of interesting parallels to what Trump has done with the pardon power and what happened with the royal pardon in the 17th century,” she explains. Meyler’s interest in the “co-creation of legal concepts with cultural developments” feels particularly relevant in today’s media-permeated landscape, and her book Theaters of Pardoning (2019) examines not only the relocation of the power of pardon in a moment of political transition in 17th century England, but also the role of drama in this shift.
Meyler’s historically and interpretively informed contributions have led her to write for different audiences: legal, scholarly and public. “I find it really invigorating to try to write for a public audience,” she says of the challenge to convey complicated ideas to a broad readership. As co-director of the Public Humanities project at Stanford, she works to involve undergraduate and graduate students in public-facing scholarship. “There are so many aspects of discussion in public life that would benefit from the insights of humanities scholars,” she says. “I think increasingly public humanities can be a part of demonstrating the value of universities to society. It’s about giving back some of the ideas that are developed within an ivory tower to our general public discourse and political discourse.”
Cue UCI: advice for current humanities and law scholars
Meyler’s own interest in public-facing work was shaped in large part by her time at UC Irvine. “Julia Lupton, who was my advisor, was very inspiring in terms of how thinking about how humanities work could be public facing and could have a more real world impact as well,” she says. She describes her time at UCI as crucial for her intellectual development, which included not only interactions with faculty in English and Comparative Literature, but the camaraderie and community of her peers.
For current and future students, Meyler suggests finding a dissertation topic that will galvanize them to approach the material regularly, and that will be of continued intellectual interest. She also offers words of encouragement for forging new and perhaps unexpected paths: “It’s worth figuring out what you’re interested in pursuing and then finding a way to do that. Sometimes combinations seem crazy, but they’re actually really innovative and interesting. I would say not to dismiss your own impulses about where your interests might lead you, and then trust that there’ll be some way to make them apply in a practical context.”
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