Latest publication:
“A Queer Constitutional History of Loss: Mayes v. Texas (1974) and the Struggle for the Right to Be Trans in Public in the 1970s,” Journal of American Constitutional History (2025), https://repository.law.wisc.edu/s/uwlaw/media/329662.

Scott De Orio is an independent scholar and political and legal historian whose research focuses on the policing and criminalization of gender and sexual practices in the United States and globally. His first book project, Policing Gay Sex: Male Homosexuality and the Expansion of the Carceral State in Modern America (under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press) examines the development of a hierarchical system of police power over male same-sex practices in the U.S. from the 1950s to the 2000s, demonstrating that this system was even more extensive than scholars have previously recognized. His second book project, The Children’s Crusade: Policing Pedophilia in the Modern Transatlantic World, takes a transnational approach to the study of sexual policing by investigating the creation of a global system of carceral power over the categories of “the pedophile” and “the boy molester” during the long twentieth century.

De Orio earned a Ph.D. in History and Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Michigan in 2017 and received the 2019 John D’Emilio LGBTQ History Dissertation Award from the Organization of American Historians. He was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Sexualities Project at Northwestern University from 2018 to 2020. His writing has appeared in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, Law & Social Inquiry, the Journal of American Constitutional History, and the edited collection The War on Sex (Duke University Press, 2017).