Professor Kenneth W. Mack

Kenneth W. Mack is the inaugural Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of History at Harvard University.  He is the co-faculty leader of the Harvard Law School Program on Law and History.  During the 2015-16 year, he served as co-faculty leader of the Workshop on the History of Capitalism in the Americas at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American history.  

His research and teaching have focused on American legal and constitutional history with particular emphasis on race relations, politics and economic life. His 2012 book, Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (Harvard University Press), was selected as a Top 50 Non-fiction Book of the Year by the Washington Post, was a National Book Festival Selection, was awarded honorable mention for the J. Willard Hurst Award by the Law and Society Association, and was a finalist for the Julia Ward Howe Book Award.  His is also the co-editor of The New Black: What Has Changed – And What Has Not – With Race in America (New Press, 2013).  His articles have been published in a wide variety of scholarly and general interest publications.  He is currently working on a book project that examines the social and political history of race and political economy in the United States after 1975.

He began his professional career as an electrical engineer at Bell Laboratories before turning to law and history.  Before joining the faculty at Harvard Law School, he clerked for the Honorable Robert L. Carter, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and practiced law in the Washington, D.C. office of the firm Covington & Burling.