Ph.D., Princeton University, 2018
J.D., Yale Law School, 2014
B.A., Bob Jones University, 2007
History of the Practice and Profession of Law
Pretrial Procedure and Bail Bonding
The Development of Federal Equity
Religious Freedom & Pluralism
Digital Text Analysis
Kellen R. Funk is a legal historian with expertise in civil procedure and remedies. He has written on the history of civil litigation practices in the United States, the development and reform of the American bail system, and the jurisprudence of churches and religious groups.
Funk joined the Columbia Law faculty in 2018 after completing a Ph.D. in American history at Princeton University, where he was a Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellow. His first book, Law’s Machinery, was published by Oxford University Press in 2025. It explores how the 1848 enactment of New York’s Field Code modernized American litigation by merging law and equity, accelerating creditors’ remedies, and giving lawyers supremacy over the rules of their practice.
Funk’s scholarship combines historical research methods with data science, including an original text analysis project mapping case law citations across all legal literature in the 19th-century United States. His co-authored study of the transmission of legal codes in Reconstruction America, published in the 2018 American Historical Review, has become a foundational work in the field of digital legal history. Other work has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Constitutional Commentary, Law & Social Inquiry, and the American Journal of Legal History. Funk’s article in the Journal of Law and Religion, “Church Corporations and the Conflict of Laws in Antebellum America,” was awarded the Harold Berman Award from the American Association of Law Schools’ Law and Religion Section and has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.
How did criminal bail work in the Founding era? This question has become pressing as bail, and bail reform, have attracted increasing legislative, political, judicial, and academic attention. After a generation of policy stagnation and academic silence, bail is back on the agenda.
Students praise Funk for his enthusiasm, intellect, and compassion. He will receive the honor, which is awarded annually by the Columbia Law graduating class, and speak at graduation on May 15.