Jeremy Kessler

Trained as a 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) explores how the contested development of the military draft transformed the relationship between civil liberties law and the administrative state. Past scholarship on the origins and development of First Amendment doctrine, the role played by administrative governance in the structuring of individual rights, and the relationship between legal and economic change has appeared or is forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Duke Law Journal, and Daedalus, among other publications.

Kessler is currently at work on four long-term projects. The first project asks when and why viewpoint discrimination came to be seen as the worst thing government can do with respect to the First Amendment. The second project argues that contemporary defenders of the administrative state place too much faith in rules, hierarchy, and expertise as sources of rationality and legitimacy. The third project argues that legal change is best explained by material change – that is, change in how humans use non-human nature to produce the goods necessary for their survival. The fourth project argues that the rise of atheism is a neglected factor in contemporary debates about the meaning and viability of the rule of law. 

Kessler is co-director of Columbia Law School’s Legal History Workshop and Columbia University’s 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. He has also served as the David Berg Foundation Fellow at the Tikvah Center for Law and Jewish Civilization at NYU School of Law, the Harry Middleton Fellow in Presidential Studies at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, and a graduate fellow at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

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.