Duncan Kennedy (born 1942) is an American legal scholar and held the Carter Professorship of General Jurisprudence at Harvard Law School until 2015. Now emeritus, he is best known as one of the founders of the critical legal studies movement.

Education and early career

Kennedy received an A.B. from Harvard College in 1964 and then worked for two years in the CIA operation that controlled the National Student Association. In 1966 he rejected his "cold war liberalism" and quit the CIA

Kennedy has been a member of the American Civil Liberties Union since 1967.

Academic work and influence

In 1977, together with Karl Klare, Mark Kelman, Roberto Unger, and other scholars, Kennedy established the critical legal studies movement. Outside legal academia, he is mostly known for his monograph Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy, famous for its trenchant critique of American legal education.

Bibliography

  • The Rise and Fall of Classical Legal Thought (privately printed in 1975, republished by Beard Books in 2006)
  • "Form and Substance in Private Law Adjudication," 89 Harvard Law Review 1685 (1976)
  • "Freedom and Constraint in Adjudication: A Critical Phenomenology," 36 Journal of Legal Education 518 (1986)
  • Sexy Dressing, etc. (Harvard University Press, 1993)
  • A Critique of Adjudication [fin de siècle] (Harvard University Press, 1997)
  • "A Semiotics of Critique," 22 Cardozo Law Review 1147 (2001)
  • "Thoughts on Coherence, Social Values and National Tradition in Private Law," in Hesselink, ed., The Politics of a European Civil Code (Kluwer Law International, Amsterdam, 2006)
  • "The Bitter Ironies of Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture Co. in the First Year Law School Curriculum," Buffalo Law Review, Vol. 71, No. 2 (April 2023), available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4371842

See also

  • Indeterminacy debate in legal theory
  • List of deconstructionists
  • List of law clerks of the Supreme Court of the United States (Seat 8)
  • Philosophy of law

Notes

  • Duncan Kennedy's Personal Website
  • Duncan Kennedy's Harvard Law School Home Page
  • Duncan Kennedy debates Noah Feldman in March 2008 at Harvard Law School, as part of a series on "Confronting Empire"
  • , lecture on law and economics