Ken 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).

Professor Kersch has published many articles in academic, intellectual, and popular journals. He 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 U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the election of Ronald Reagan as President (1980).

Professor 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.

Selected Recent Publications

“Beyond Originalism: Conservative Declarationism and Constitutional Redemption,” Maryland Law Review 71 (2011): 229-282.

Review Essay on Philip Hamburger’s Law and Judicial Duty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), Journal of Policy History, 23:4 (2011): 586-593.

“Ecumenicalism Through Constitutionalism: The Discursive Development of Constitutional Conservatism in National Review, 1955-1980,” Studies in American Political Development (Spring 2011): 1-31.

"A Friend to the Union," A Review of John Marshall: Writings (New York: Library of America, 2010)(Charles Hobson, editor), Claremont Review of Books (Summer 2010): 57-59.

Professor Kersch is a regular blogger at Balkinization:  http://balkin.blogspot.com, a constitutional law blog run by Jack Balkin (Yale Law School).

Professor Kersch has been a featured guest blogger (July 2011) at the Legal History Blog:  http://legalhistoryblog.blogspot.com, a legal history blog run by Mary Dudziak (USC Law School), Daniel Ernst (Georgetown Law School), Karen Tani (UC-Berkeley Law School), and Tomiko Brown-Nagin (University of Virginia Law School).