Ken I. Kersch is founding director of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy and associate professor of political science, history, and law at Boston College. His primary interests are American political and constitutional development, American political thought, and the politics of courts. He is the recipient of the American Political Science Association's Edward S. Corwin Award (2000), the J. David Greenstone Prize (2006) from APSA's politics and history section, and the Hughes-Gossett Award from the Supreme Court Historical Society (2006). He has published many articles in academic, intellectual, and popular journals.
Prof. Kersch is the author of The Supreme Court and American Political Development (Kansas, 2006) (with Ronald Kahn), Constructing Civil Liberties: Discontinuities in the Development of American Constitutional Law (Cambridge, 2004), and Freedom of Speech: Rights and Liberties Under the Law (ABC-Clio, 2003). He is currently working on a book on the development of constitutional conservatism between the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.
Prof. Kersch is member of the bar of New York, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia. He received his B.A. (magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) from Williams College, his J.D. (cum laude and Order of the Coif) from Northwestern University, and his Ph.D. in government from Cornell University. Kersch has been a visiting associate professor of government at Harvard University (2008). Prior to coming to Boston College, he was the inaugural Ann and Herbert W. Vaughan Fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions (2001-2002) and assistant professor of politics (2003-2007) at Princeton University.
James Q. Wilson is senior fellow at the Clough Center, and distinguished scholar in Boston College’s Department of Political Science. One of the nation’s most eminent and influential scholars, Wilson taught political science at Harvard University, where he was Shattuck Professor of Government from 1961-1987. From 1985-1997, he was the James Collins Professor of Management and Public Policy at UCLA, and, from 1998-2008, was the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. Wilson is the author of many articles, and is author or co-author of fourteen books, the most recent of which are The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families (Harper Collins, 2002), Moral Judgment (Basic Books, 1997), The Moral Sense (Free Press, 1993). His other books include Bureaucracy (Basic Books, 1989), Thinking About Crime (Vintage Books, 1985), Varieties of Police Behavior (Harvard University Press, 1978), Political Organizations (Princeton University Press, 1995), and Crime and Human Nature (with Richard Herrnstein)(Simon and Schuster, 1985). Wilson is a member both of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He is the author of the leading textbook on American government. He is a past president of the American Political Science Association, and the recipient of the organization's Lifetime Achievement Award. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Harvard, and was presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House.
Michael S. Greve is the Clough Center Adjunct Professor of Political Science. He will be teaching a course on comparative constitutional design. Greve is currently the John G. Searle Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and the head of its transatlantic forum. From 2004–08, he was director of the AEI Federalism Project. In 1989, Greve co-founded the Center for Individual Rights (CIR), a public interest law firm, where he served as director until 2000. He has written extensively on many aspects of the American legal system, and his publications include numerous law review articles and books, including The Demise of Environmentalism in American Law (1996); Real Federalism: Why It Matters, How It Could Happen (1999); and Harmless Lawsuits? What's Wrong With Consumer Class Actions (2005). He is the co-author, with Richard A. Epstein, of Competition Laws in Conflict: Antitrust Jurisdiction in the Global Economy (2004) and Federal Preemption: States' Powers, National Interests (2007). His current projects include a book on the constitutional foundations of competitive federalism and a volume on citizenship in Europe and the United States.
Hillary Thompson serves as graduate assistant to the Center director. Thompson is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Boston College, concentrating in American politics. She attended St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and is a graduate of Swarthmore College. hillary.thompson.1@bc.edu