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Kenneth Mack

  • The 14th Amendment

    April 15, 2024

    Of all the amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the 14th is a big one. It’s shaped all of our lives, whether we realize it or…

  • A ‘Wary Faith’ in the Courts

    March 18, 2024

    During its heyday in the 1960s the civil rights movement caused deep divisions in American society. More recently it has been absorbed into a whiggish…

  • young woman celebrating in field of yellow flowers.

    How to unwind and find your ‘happy place’

    September 8, 2023

    Members of the Harvard Law community discuss their favorite ways to loosen up and find their “happy place.”

  • Closeup of flowers.

    How I discovered my passion in the law

    September 5, 2023

    Professors, lecturers, and staff members share how they found their way to the subjects they are most passionate about — and why they stay there.

  • Sunglasses on top of a stack of books at the beach

    Summer 2023 Harvard Law faculty reading recommendations

    June 13, 2023

    Looking for a summer book recommendation? Check out what these members of the Harvard Law School faculty plan to read — and listen to — this summer.

  • King: The Life of Martin Luther King by Jonathan Eig review – a story that speaks to our times

    May 30, 2023

    An article by Kenneth Mack: Who was the Rev Martin Luther King Jr? In America, the civil rights activist and Baptist minister is now embraced…

  • Biden’s meeting with historians over threats to democracy draws criticism

    September 2, 2022

    Historians were invited to the White House to advise President Biden on threats to democracy. But the group faced criticism for being all white, and…

  • An orange striped towel rests on the arm of a wooden beach chair that's on the sand facing the ocean. A book and sunglasses on the sand next to the chair.

    Summer 2022 beach reads

    June 26, 2022

    Harvard Law faculty and staff share their reading lists for beachside, poolside, or inside with the AC.

  • Guy-Uriel Charles

    Guy-Uriel Charles elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

    May 10, 2022

    Professor Guy-Uriel E. Charles, the Charles Ogletree, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

  • Opinion: Did Ketanji Brown Jackson rule against Black workers? It’s not so simple.

    February 23, 2022

    An op-ed co-written by Kenneth W. Mack: As President Biden prepares to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, it’s worth pausing to consider the story of Constance Baker Motley, the first African American woman appointed to the federal bench. In 1975, Motley presided over a case in which a White woman, Diane Blank, had filed a class-action suit against the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell for sex discrimination.

  • Zoom screen with three women and one man

    Constance Baker Motley

    February 15, 2022

    Georgetown Law Professor Sheryll Cashin ’89 once asked her mentor, Thurgood Marshall, why he had passed over Constance Baker Motley to succeed him when he…

  • What Fannie Lou Hamer can teach today’s activists

    November 22, 2021

    Book review by Kenneth W. Mack, Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law: The civil rights activist and leader Fannie Lou Hamer spoke truth to power with an authenticity that makes her words, her actions and even her singing seem to have immediate appeal to us. In 1962, Hamer was a Mississippi sharecropper with little formal schooling when she decided to attend a voting rights organizing meeting at a local church. Two years later, she was facing down President Lyndon Johnson and the national civil rights leadership at the Democratic National Convention. ... The historian Keisha N. Blain’s “Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America” employs “a blend of social commentary, biography, and intellectual history” to harness Hamer’s example for the present.

  • Group discussion around a table

    Reading the law

    November 10, 2021

    Harvard Law School’s upper-level reading groups give students the opportunity to dig into unique subjects connected directly — or not — to the law.

  • Civil Rights: Plessy v Ferguson

    June 2, 2021

    Today in our series on civil rights Supreme Court cases, we examine the anticanon decision of Plessy v Ferguson. Steven Luxenberg, Kenneth Mack, Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson walk us through the story of Homer Plessy, the Separate Car Act of 1890, an infamous opinion and a famous dissent.

  • Plessy v. Ferguson at 125

    May 19, 2021

    One hundred and twenty five years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, Harvard Law Professor Kenneth Mack ’91 says there are still lessons to be gleaned from the case.

  • How a decades-long conversation shaped the young United States

    May 17, 2021

    A book review by Kenneth MackAkhil Reed Amar’s “The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840” is the rarest of things — a constitutional romance. Amar, an eminent professor of law and political science at Yale, has great affection for his subject as a text that is worthy of loving engagement by scholars and the public at large. His 700-page narrative covers the “main constitutional episodes” that Americans faced as they revolted against Britain, created a Constitution and Bill of Rights, and built a new nation. Amar argues that the rebellious British subjects sparked a decades-long “constitutional conversation,” which eventually drew in men such as John Adams, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Chief Justice John Marshall. His book appears at a time when the Constitution has been criticized for its suppression of the revolution’s popular impulses, its undemocratic features such as the electoral college, its embeddedness in slavery and its deliberate exclusion of so many from its iconic invocation of “We the People.” Amar’s story is more celebratory, but the strength of his argument depends on whether his central metaphor of a conversation accurately captures what is at stake in this book.

  • The Diane Rehm Book Club: “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” by Isabel Wilkerson

    April 22, 2021

    For the April meeting of The Diane Rehm Book Club, Diane and guests discuss "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents," by Isabel Wilkerson. She is joined by Kenneth Mack, professor of law and affiliate professor of history at Harvard University and author of "Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer"; Suraj Yengde, author of the "Caste Matters" and co-editor of the anthology "The Radical in Ambedkar" and a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School; and Dwight Garner, book critic for The New York Times.

  • Corporations that back voting rights will find it’s good for business, too

    April 21, 2021

    An op-ed by Norman Eisen and Kenneth W. MackSome of our largest businesses are having a political awakening. From Bank of America to Apple to Coca-Cola to Delta Air Lines, corporate boardrooms are speaking out against new laws in Georgia and elsewhere that will disproportionately make it harder for Black voters to participate in elections. As companies decide how to respond to such laws, they would do well to look for inspiration from the civil rights movement of the 20th century. The evidence suggests that weighing in on the side of justice was not only the right thing to do — in many cases, it was also the profitable thing, serving a double bottom line. Recent work by the economist and historian Gavin Wright has documented the substantial, albeit unequal, gains that accrued to Southerners and the businesses that served them, due to the fall of the Jim Crow system. The numbers are striking: “[S]outhern retail business lagged the nation throughout the years of sit-ins and mass boycotts.” But after the businesses desegregated, Wright found, Dallas department stores saw sales increase by over 80 percent just seven years later (from desegregation in 1961 to 1968), while during the same time span a decade before, sales had been flat or slow in growth.