Steven Macias

Steven Macias joined the faculty at McGeorge School of Law as a Visiting Professor of Law in July 2024. His regular appointment is at the University of the District of Columbia, where he is a professor of law. He has previously served on the law school faculties of the University of South Dakota and Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, as both a professor of law and associate dean of academic affairs.

Professor Macias’s primary areas of scholarship include legal history, constitutional law, and education law. With interdisciplinary graduate training in history (UC Berkeley) and education policy (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Macias seeks insight into the intellectual threads that lay hidden behind our longstanding, everyday assumptions within law and public policy, especially as those policies affect socially and legally marginalized groups. A current research project examines the origins of the modern “free speech” movements on university campuses beginning with litigation in the late-1980s, early-1990s. It seeks to uncover how “free speech” went from a concern of the political left throughout much of the twentieth century to a conservative concern in more recent times.

Other areas of interest include the nineteenth-century origins of modern university legal education. His book, Legal Science in the Early Republic, examined the intellectual and philosophical roots of early attempts to systematize legal education. He followed up the book with a similar investigation focused on constitutional law. More recently, Macias has been writing about the intersection of privacy and gender, especially in relation to the legal regulation of public bathroom spaces.

Professor Macias has taught a range of public law courses that intersect with his research, including constitutional law, legislation & regulation, election law, and privacy law. He has also regularly taught first-year courses, including torts and criminal law. He received his undergraduate education at Stanford University and his legal education at UC Berkeley and University College London.