Professor Kenneth W. Mack ’91, the Lawrence D. Biele Professor at Harvard Law School and affiliate professor of History at Harvard University, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Mack is a leading scholar of the legal and constitutional history of American race relations, whose scholarly work focuses on the connection between racial-professional identity and civil rights lawyering in the early twentieth century United States.
One of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies and a leading center for independent policy research, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences honors exceptional individuals and leadership in academia, the arts, industry, public policy, and research.
In addition to Mack, nearly 250 members were elected this year, including 20 Harvard University faculty and Harvard Law alums Rubén Blades LL.M. ’85 — Salsa legend and actor — and Daniel B. Rodriguez ’87— Harold Washington Professor and former dean of New York University’s Law School. New members will be inducted at a ceremony later this year.
Among this year’s recipients are CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper, filmmaker, and producer Ava DuVernay and activist Gloria Steinem.
“The academy honors excellence across a wide range of disciplines and professions, and our newly elected members have demonstrated expertise and leadership of astonishing breadth and impact,” said Chair of the Board Goodwin Liu, associate justice of the California Supreme Court. “We look forward to engaging their diverse talents and experiences through academy initiatives that bring interdisciplinary inquiry and unfettered pursuit of knowledge to bear on our society’s greatest challenges.”
Mack’s 2012 book, “Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer” (Harvard University Press), a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, a National Book Festival Selection, was also 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. He is also the co-editor of “In Between and Across: Legal History Without Boundaries” (Oxford University Press, 2024) and “The New Black: What Has Changed — And What Has Not — With Race in America” (New Press, 2013). His work has been published in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Journal of American History, Law and History Review and other scholarly journals.
Mack serves as the co-faculty leader of the Harvard Law School Program on Law and History.
In 2016-17, Mack was a Radcliffe fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. In 2007, he was named a Fletcher fellow by the Fletcher Foundation. He has served as the co-director of the workshops: “Capitalism’s Hardwiring: Money, Credit, and Finance in a Globalizing World” (2022-23), “The History of Capitalism in the Americas” (2015-16), and “The Long Civil Rights Movement” (2008-09), all at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.
He has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and Georgetown Universities, and the University of Hawai’i, and has served as senior visiting scholar, Centre for History and Economics at University of Cambridge. In 2020, he received the Harvard Law School Student Government Teaching and Advising Award. In 2016, President Obama appointed him to the Permanent Committee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise. He is also a member of the American Law Institute.
Mack began his professional career as an electrical engineer at Bell Laboratories before turning to lawand history. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1991, 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.
Other members of the Harvard Law faculty who have been selected as fellows in previous years, include: Carol Steiker ’86, Guy-Uriel E. Charles, David J. Barron ’94, Lucian Bebchuk LL.M. ’80 S.J.D. ’84, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Victor Brudney, Robert Clark ’72, Richard Fallon, Noah Feldman, Roger Fisher ’48, Jody Freeman LL.M. ’91 S.J.D. ’95, Charles Fried, Nancy Gertner, Mary Ann Glendon, Jack Goldsmith, Annette Gordon-Reed ’84, Charles Haar ’48, Morton Horwitz ’67, Vicki Jackson, Elena Kagan ’86, Benjamin Kaplan, Louis Kaplow ’81, Duncan Kennedy, Randall Kennedy, Michael Klarman, John F. Manning ’85, Daniel Meltzer ’75, Frank Michelman ’60, Martha Minow, Robert Mnookin ’68, Gerald L. Neuman ’80, Mark Roe ’75, Steven Shavell, William Stuntz , Cass Sunstein ’78, Laurence Tribe ’66, Mark Tushnet, Roberto Mangabeira Unger LL.M. ’70 S.J.D. ’76, Adrian Vermeule ’93, Elizabeth Warren, David Wilkins ’80 and Jonathan Zittrain ’95.
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