Political Science Faculty
Ken I. Kersch
Professor
Ken I. Kersch
Ph.D.
Contact
McGuinn Hall Room 515
Telephone: 617-552-4167
Email: kenneth.kersch.1@bc.edu
Education
- B.A. Williams College
- J.D. Northwestern University
- M.A. Cornell University
- Ph.D. Cornell University
Research Interests
American Political and Constitutional Development; American Political Thought; Politics of Courts
Office Hours
T/Th 1:30-2:30pm and by appointment
Selected Publications
- “The Spirit of ’76 and the Spirit of January 6,” American Political Thought 11(4)(Fall 2022): 560-578.
- “The Messianic Presidency in Conservative Constitutional Thought,” The Constitutionalist (April 30, 2021).
- American Political Thought: An Invitation (Polity, 2021).
- "The Overlooked Conservative Tradition That Embraces an Executive Like Donald Trump," The Atlantic (October 25, 2019).
- Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
- “The Distinctiveness of the Supreme Court: An Historical Institutionalist Perspective,” Constitutional Studies 4 (2019).
- “Equality,” in Karen Orren and John Compton, editors, Cambridge Companion to the U.S. Constitution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
- “Originalism’s Curiously Triumphant Death: The Interpenetration of Aspirationalism and Historicism in U.S. Constitutional Development,” Constitutional Commentary (Summer 2016)(re-published in Problema Anuario de Filosofía y Teoría del Derecho (International Journal on Legal Theory and Philosophy) (Enero-Diciembre, 2017) (Mexico City, Mexico).
- “Constitutional Conservatives Remember The Progressive Era,” in Stephen Skowronek, Stephen Engel, and Bruce Ackerman, editors, The Progressives’ Century: Democratic Reform and Constitutional Government in the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).
- “Constitutive Stories About the Common Law in Modern American Conservatism,” in Sanford Levinson, Joel Parker, Melissa Williams, editors, NOMOS: American Conservatism (New York: New York University Press, 2016).
- “The Gilded Age Through the Progressive Era,” in Mark Tushnet, Mark Graber, and Sanford Levinson, editors, Oxford Handbook on The United States Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
- “The Talking Cure: How Constitutional Argument Drives Constitutional Development," Boston University Law Review 94 (May 2014): 1083-1108.
- “Systems and Feelings," in James E. Fleming, editor, NOMOS LIII: Passions and Emotions (New York: New York University Press, 2013): 289-303.
- “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.
- “Everything is Enumerated: The Developmental Past and Future of an Interpretive Problem,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 8 (September 2006): 957-982.
- “Justice Breyer’s Mandarin Liberty," University of Chicago Law Review 73 (Spring 2006): 759-822.
- “How Conduct Became Speech and Speech Became Conduct: A Political Development Case Study in Labor Law and the Freedom of Speech,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 2 (March 2006): 255-297.
- “Smoking, Progressive Liberalism, and the Law,” Critical Review 16 (2005): 405-430.
- “The New Legal Transnationalism, the Globalized Judiciary, and the Rule of Law," Washington University Global Studies Law Review 4 (2005): 345-387.
- “The Reconstruction of Constitutional Privacy Rights and the New American State,” Studies in American Political Development 16 (Spring 2002): 61-87.