Aya Gruber is a professor at the Harold M. Heimbaugh Professor of Law at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law and an expert on criminal law, violence against women, and critical theory. Before academia, Professor Gruber was a public defender in Washington D.C. and Miami, FL. She combines insight from this practice experience and legal, historical, and sociological research in her widely-cited legal scholarship that has been covered in outlets including the New York Times, Slate, The Guardian, Reason Magazine, the Harvard Law Review, and the Michigan Law Review. In 2020 Gruber published The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration, which PEN America called “an exciting and brave book that tackles the cause and effect between gender-based violence, mass incarceration, and a broken legal system.” Her latest article, Sex Exceptionalism in Criminal Law (Stanford Law Review 2023) critiques American law’s treatment of sex crimes as categorically different from and significantly worse than all other crimes. Professor Gruber’s current book in progress, The Crime of Sex, will be the first to provide a comprehensive genealogical examination of the American sex criminalization program, exploring convergences and divergences between socially conservative regulatory programs (i.e. outlawing same-sex intimacy) and liberal ones (i.e. feminist rape reform).