Jeremy K. Kessler, Associate Professor of Law, is a legal historian whose scholarship focuses on First Amendment law, administrative law, and constitutional law generally. He joined the Columbia Law School faculty in 2015 and is co-director of Columbia University's 20th Century Politics and Society Workshop and Columbia Law School's Legal History Workshop. He also serves on the ABA’s Committee on the History of Administrative Law.

Kessler’s forthcoming book, Fortress of Liberty: The Rise and Fall of the Draft and the Remaking of American Law, Harvard, explores how the contested development of the military draft transformed the relationship between civil liberties law and the American administrative state. His articles on First Amendment law, administrative law, constitutional theory, and American legal history have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the Texas Law Review, among other publications. Kessler also writes about law and history for non-academic publications, including The New Republic, n+1, The Boston Review, and Jacobin.

Prior to joining Columbia Law School, Kessler clerked for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He previously served as the David Berg Foundation Fellow at the Tikvah Center for Law & Jewish Civilization at NYU School of Law; as a graduate fellow at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law; and as the Harry Middleton Fellow in Presidential Studies at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library.

Kessler received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was a Legal History Fellow and the executive editor of the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. He earned a M.Phil. in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge and a B.A. from Yale College, summa cum laude.