Jeremy Kessler

A noted legal historian, Jeremy Kessler writes primarily about First Amendment law, administrative law, and legal theory. His forthcoming book, Conscription and Constitutional Change in Twentieth Century America (Harvard University Press, 2025) explores how the contested development of the military draft transformed the relationship between civil liberties law and the American administrative state. 

Kessler’s past scholarship has investigated the origins of modern First Amendment law, the legal and political economic foundations of the administrative state, and transatlantic debates about the relationship between rights and governance throughout the 20th century. His writing has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Duke Law Journal, and Texas Law Review, among other publications. 

Kessler is co-director of Columbia Law School’s Legal History Workshop, and Columbia University’s new Workshop on Knowledge and the State, a project of the Center for Political Economy at Columbia World Projects.

Earlier in his career, Kessler clerked for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. His prior positions include the David Berg Foundation Fellowship at the Tikvah Center for Law and Jewish Civilization at NYU School of Law, a graduate fellowship at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, and the Harry Middleton Fellowship in Presidential Studies at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library.

During his time at Yale Law School, Kessler was a Legal History Fellow and the executive editor of the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities.