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Ken I. Kersch (born Kenneth Ira; 1964 in Bay Shore, New York) is an American political scientist. He received a B.A. in economics from Williams College, a J.D. from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University.  He has taught at Lehigh and Princeton Universities, and is currently Professor of Political Science at Boston College.

Kersch has written on a wide array of subjects in political science, political thought, history, law, and American constitutional and American political development. His scholarship charts the patterned interrelationship over time between political ideas and ideologies and American constitutional thought, law, and practice.

Kersch’s first monograph Constructing Civil Liberties: Discontinuities in the Development of American Constitutional Law (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

demonstrated that, contrary to most contemporary understandings, the emergence of modern progressive and New Deal liberal constitutional civil liberties jurisprudence was heavily implicated in not just limiting the reach of the modern American state but in building, empowering, and legitimating it.  The book was awarded two major prizes from the American Political Science Association, the Edward S. Corwin Award (for the earlier dissertation version at Cornell, chaired by Theodore J. Lowi) and the J. David Greenstone Prize for the best book on politics and history.

Kersch’s second monograph Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of

American Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2019) challenged contemporary understandings of Reagan and post-Reagan era constitutional conservatism as involving fixed commitments to unchanging foundational premises like originalism, promising the restoration of the rule of law following an unmoored, liberal “living constitutionalism." It does this by examining the extensive pre-Reagan Era movement conservative discourse and debate outside legal academia concerning the meaning and requirements of the U.S. Constitution. In so doing, the book surveys highly contested and conflicting constitutional arguments amongst diverse corners and schools within the postwar conservative movement anchored in substantively conservative, rather than purportedly neutral, rule of law legal theory.  The book thus posits the emergence and subsequent near hegemony of later forms of conservative rule of law constitutional theory like originalism and textualism as constitutive of the process of an ascendant Reagan and post-Reagan era conservative statebuilding project and the would-be legitimation of a contemporary conservative political and constitutional regime. Conservatives and the Constitution was recognized by the C. Herman Pritchett Award from the law and courts section of the American Political Science for the best book on law and courts.

Kersch has also written additional books, book chapters, and articles on diverse topics in American constitutional development and American political thought, most of which identify and explicate patterns of institutional change and their relation to public sphere ideational and ideological contestation.

Prizes/Awards

C. Herman Pritchett Award (2020), American Political Science Association, Law and Courts Section

J. David Greenstone Prize (2006), American Political Science Association, Politics and History Section

Hughes-Gossett Award (2006), The Supreme Court Historical Society

Edward S. Corwin Award (2000), American Political Science Association

Books

American Political Thought: An Invitation (Polity, 2021).

Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

The Supreme Court and American Political Development (University Press of Kansas, 2006) (with Ronald Kahn).

Constructing Civil Liberties: Discontinuities in the Development of American Constitutional Law (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Companion/Handbook Chapters

“Equality,” in Karen Orren and John Compton, editors, Cambridge Companion to the U.S. Constitution (Cambridge University Press, 2018): 134-158.

“The Gilded Age Through the Progressive Era,” in Mark Tushnet, Mark Graber, and Sanford Levinson, editors, Oxford Handbook on The United States Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2015): 69-90.

Articles

“The Distinctiveness of the Supreme Court: An Historical Institutionalist Perspective,” Constitutional Studies 4 (2019): 31-44.

“Originalism’s Curiously Triumphant Death: The Interpenetration of Aspirationalism and Historicism in U.S. Constitutional Development,” Constitutional Commentary 31 (2016): 413-429.

“The Talking Cure: How Constitutional Argument Drives Constitutional Development," Boston University Law Review 94 (May 2014): 1083-1108.

“Beyond Originalism:  Conservative Declarationism and Constitutional Redemption,” Maryland Law Review 71 (2011): 229-282.

“Ecumenicalism Through Constitutionalism:  The Discursive Development of Constitutional Conservatism in National Review, 1955-1980,” Studies in American Political Development 25 (Spring 2011): 86-116.

“’Guilt by Association’ and the Post War Civil Libertarians,” Social Philosophy and Policy 25: 2 (Summer 2008): 53-75.

Everything is Enumerated:  The Developmental Past and Future of an Interpretive Problem,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 8 (September 2006): 957-982.

“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.

“The Gompers v. Bucks Stove Saga:  A Constitutional Case Study in Dialogue, Resistance, and the Freedom of Speech,” Journal of Supreme Court History 31 (2006): 28-57.

“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.

Book Chapters

“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): 130-154.

“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): 211-255.

“Systems and Feelings,” in James E. Fleming, editor, NOMOS LIII: Passions and Emotions (New York: New York University Press, 2013): 289-303.

“Neoconservatism and the Courts: The Public Interest, 1965-1980,” in Bradley C.S. Watson, editor, Ourselves and Our Posterity:  Essays in Constitutional Originalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009): 247-296.

“The Justice as Diplomat: The Foreign Policy Frameworks Behind the U.S. Supreme Court’s New Globalism,” in Anthony Langlois and Karol Soltan, editors, Global Democracy and its Difficulties (London: Routledge, 2008):  95-111.

“Stephen Breyer,” in Melvin Urofsky, editor, Supreme Court Justices: A Biographical Dictionary (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2006):  74-88.

“The New Deal Triumph as the End of History?  The Judicial Negotiation of Labor Rights and Civil Rights,” in Kahn and Kersch, editors, The Supreme Court and American Political Development (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006): 169-226.