Professor Dara E. Purvis is a scholar of family law, sexual orientation and gender identity, feminist legal theory, and masculinities. Her recent work focuses on the constitutional rights of transgender children, gender policing, and trad wives. Her article Transgender Students and the First Amendment received a 2025 Dukeminier Award, given by the Williams Institute for the best legal scholarship about sexual orientation, gender identity, and the law. Her work has appeared in the California Law Review, Boston University Law Review, Wake Forest Law Review, Florida State Law Review, Michigan State Law Review, the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, Cambridge University Press, and The New York Times.
Prior to joining Temple University Beasley School of Law, Professor Purvis was a professor at Penn State Law and visiting assistant professor at the University of Illinois College of Law. A former editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal, she clerked for The Hon. Gerard E. Lynch, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and The Hon. Raymond C. Fisher, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.