Kerrel Murray

Kerrel Murray teaches and writes about constitutional law (with a particular interest in Reconstruction), election law, and race and the law, among other topics. His scholarship interrogates what democracy demands of our legal rules and institutions as well as the role of law in mediating conflict and disagreement. In 2023, he was named the Yale Law Journal’s Emerging Scholar of the Year.

Before joining Columbia Law School in 2021, he completed a two-year fellowship as a post-doc research associate at the University of North Carolina School of Law. Prior to that, Murray served as a fellow at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where he co-authored amicus briefs in the U.S. Supreme Court and multiple state supreme courts. He was also an associate in Covington & Burling’s Washington, D.C., office, where he focused on complex civil litigation. He clerked for then-Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, for Judge Timothy M. Tymkovich on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, and for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her first Term on the Supreme Court of the United States.