Douglas NeJaime

Douglas NeJaime is Anne Urowsky Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he teaches in the areas of legal ethics, family law, and constitutional law. Before joining the Yale faculty in 2017, NeJaime was Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, where he served as Faculty Director of the Williams Institute, a research institute on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy. He has also served on the faculties at UC Irvine School of Law and Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, and was Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

NeJaime is the co-author of three casebooks: Ethical Lawyering: Legal and Professional Responsibilities in the Practice of Law (with Paul Hayden); Family Law in a Changing America (with Ralph Richard Banks, Joanna Grossman, and Suzanne Kim); and Cases and Materials on Sexuality, Gender Identity, and the Law (with Carlos Ball, Jane Schacter, and William Rubenstein). 

NeJaime writes in a number of related areas. His scholarship in family law includes: “Multiparenthood,” 99 N.Y.U. Law Review 1242 (2024), with Courtney Joslin;“Parents in Fact,” 91 University of Chicago Law Review 513 (2024); “How Parenthood Functions,” 123 Columbia Law Review 319 (2023), with Courtney Joslin; “The Nature of Parenthood,” 126 Yale Law Journal 2260 (2017); “Marriage Equality and the New Parenthood,” 129 Harvard Law Review 1185 (2016); and “Before Marriage: The Unexplored History of Nonmarital Recognition and Its Relationship to Marriage,” 102 California Law Review 87 (2014). NeJaime’s scholarship in constitutional law includes: “Answering the Lochner Objection: Reexamining Substantive Due Process and the Role of Courts in a Democracy,” 96 N.Y.U. Law Review 1902 (2021), with Reva Siegel; and “The Constitution of Parenthood,” 72 Stanford Law Review 261 (2020). His scholarship on the legal profession and law and social movements includes: “Winning Through Losing,” 96 Iowa Law Review 941 (2011); and “Lawyering for Marriage Equality,” 57 UCLA Law Review 1235 (2010) (with Scott Cummings). His scholarship in law and religion includes: “Conscience Wars: Complicity-Based Conscience Claims in Religion and Politics,” 124 Yale Law Journal 2516 (2015), with Reva Siegel; and “Marriage Inequality: Same-Sex Relationships, Religious Exemptions, and the Production of Sexual Orientation Discrimination,” 100 California Law Review 1169 (2012).

On three occasions, NeJaime received the Dukeminier Award, which recognizes the best sexual orientation legal scholarship published in the previous year. He also received the YLW Faculty Excellence Award at Yale Law School and was chosen by the graduating class to be the Yale Law School commencement speaker in 2024. NeJaime received the Women’s Law Association teaching award at Harvard Law School, the Professor of the Year Award at UC Irvine School of Law, and the Excellence in Teaching Award at Loyola Law School.

NeJaime has been a leader on national efforts to reform parentage laws to accommodate families that feature nonbiological parent-child relationships, including those formed by same-sex couples and through assisted reproduction. NeJaime led the effort to pass comprehensive parentage reform in Connecticut, serving as the principal drafter of the Connecticut Parentage Act, Public Act 21-15, which passed with near-unanimous support in both chambers of the legislature and was signed by Governor Ned Lamont in 2021.