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Kenneth W. Mack

Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law

and Affiliate Professor of History
Harvard Law School

Cambridge, MA 02138 | kmack@law.harvard.edu

Kenneth W. Mack

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  • Biography
  • Books
    • All Books
    • Representing the Race
    • The New Black
  • Articles & Essays
  • Lectures
  • Opinion / Reviews
  • Interviews
  • Classes
  •  

    KENNETH W. MACK is the inaugural Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the co-faculty leader of the Harvard Law School Program on Law and History. From 2016 to 2017, he was a Radcliffe Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. During the 2015-16 year, he served as co-faculty leader of the Workshop on the History of Capitalism in the Americas at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American history. His research and teaching have focused on American legal and constitutional history with particular emphasis on race relations, politics and economic life. His 2012 book, Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (Harvard University Press), was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, was a National Book Festival Selection, was awarded honorable mention for the J. Willard Hurst Award by the Law and Society Association, and was a finalist for the Julia Ward Howe Book Award. His is also the co-editor of The New Black: What Has Changed – And What Has Not – With Race in America (New Press, 2013), and the forthcoming In Between and Across: Legal History Without Boundaries (Oxford University Press).

    He has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and Georgetown Universities, and the University of Hawai'i, and has served as a Senior Visiting Scholar at the Centre for History and Economics at Cambridge University. In 2020, he received the Harvard Law School Student Government Teaching and Advising Award. In 2007, he was named a Fletcher Fellow by the Fletcher Foundation. In 2016, President Obama appointed him to the Permanent Committee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise, and he was elected as a member of the American Law Institute. He also served as a Judge for the 100 & Change $100 Million grant competition for the MacArthur Foundation. He has commented on history and politics on This Week With George Stephanopoulos, the PBS News Hour, the Diane Rehm Book Club, and other media outlets, and has written opinion pieces for TIME, the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, The Root, Baltimore Sun, and other general interest publications.

    He began his professional career as an electrical engineer at Bell Laboratories before turning to law and history. Before joining the faculty at Harvard Law School, he clerked for the Honorable Robert L. Carter, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and practiced law in the Washington, D.C. office of the firm Covington & Burling.

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Recent Activities

  • Articles & Essays

    Critical Race Theory and Scholarly Analyses of Race in France, in Race et Droit (Bayonne, France: Institut Francophone pour la Justice et la Démocratie, 2021).

    Race, Violence and the Word, in Race, Rights and Redemption: The Derrick Bell Lectures on the Law and Critical Race Theory (New York: The New Press, 2021) (Janet Dewart Bell and Vincent M. Southerland, eds.).

    Second Mode Inclusion Claims in the Law Schools, 87 Fordham Law Review 1005 (2018).

    Lawyers Make Law?’: Bob Gordon and the Critical History of the Legal Profession: A Roundtable, Law and History Review: The Docket, October 2018.

    The Two Modes of Inclusion, 129 Harvard Law Review Forum 290 (2016).

    Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt’s Beloved Radical, Boston Review, February 29, 2016.

    Civil Disobedience, State Action, and Lawmaking Outside the Courts: Robert Bell’s Encounter with American Law, 39 Journal of Supreme Court History 347 (2014).

    A Short Biography of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 67 S.M.U. Law Review 229 (2014).

    Civil Rights History: The Old and The New, Harvard Law Review Forum (June 2013).

    Law and Local Knowledge in the History of the Civil Rights Movement, 125 Harvard Law Review 1018 (2012) (reviewing Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Oxford University Press, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (2011)).... Read more about Articles & Essays

  • Interviews

    Civil Rights: Plessy v. Ferguson. Civics 101 Podcast. June 1, 2021.

    The Diane Rehm Book Club: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. April 21, 2021.

    ...

    Read more about Interviews
  • Lectures

    Race, Violence and the Word, Derrick Bell Lecture on Race and Society, New York University School of Law, November 6, 2019.

    Historians in the Court (on historians’ roles in the Supreme Court and in litigation), Organization of American Historians’ Annual Meeting, New Orleans, Louisiana, April 6, 2017.

    The Fourteenth Amendment: Its Radical Past (and Future?). Harvard University, November 22, 2016.

    Leon Silverman Lecture: Bell v. Maryland. United States Supreme Court, October 23, 2013.

    At the National Book Festival. The National Mall, Washington, D.C., September 22-23, 2013.

    ... Read more about Lectures

  • Opinion / Reviews

    Did Ketanji Brown Jackson Rule Against Black Workers? It’s Not So Simple. Washington Post. February 21, 2022.

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