Columbia Law School has
announced that legal historian
Jeremy K. Kessler will join the faculty in July, 2015. Here's the Columbia
press release:
New York, January 21, 2014—Jeremy K. Kessler, a legal
historian whose scholarship focuses on First Amendment law,
administrative law, and constitutional law generally, will join the
Columbia Law School faculty July 1, 2015.
Kessler also has research interests in national security law,
international human rights law, law and religion, and American
political development. His current Ph.D. dissertation research traces
how the rise and fall of the American draft transformed the
relationship between civil liberties law and the administrative state.
Combining legal history, political history, and constitutional theory,
Kessler argues that civil liberties law rose to prominence in the early
20th century as part of a larger state-building project, and that
leading civil libertarians initially saw administrative agencies as the
primary enforcers of individual rights.
Kessler’s article, “The Administrative Origins of Modern Civil Liberties Law” (forthcoming from Columbia Law Review),
unearths the improbable beginnings of modern civil liberties law in
Woodrow Wilson’s War Department, where Felix Frankfurter, Harlan Fiske
Stone, and a cadre of progressive administrators constructed a novel
approach to conscientious objection. Kessler also writes about law and
history for a wide range of non-academic publications, including The New Republic, n+1, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Kessler joins Columbia Law School from the Tikvah Center for
Law & Jewish Civilization at New York University, where he served
as the David Berg Foundation Fellow. Previously, he was a graduate
fellow at Cardozo School of Law and a Middleton Fellow in Presidential
Studies at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.
He is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale College and a Gates
Cambridge Scholar who received an M.Phil. with distinction in the
history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge.
Kessler earned a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was a Legal
History Fellow and executive editor of the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities.
Kessler will clerk for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in 2014–2015.
Congratulations to Jeremy Kessler!
