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 and in 1970 earned an LL.B. from Yale Law School. After completing a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Kennedy joined the Harvard Law School faculty, becoming a full professor in 1976. In March 2010 he received an Honoris Causa (honorary degree) Ph.D. title from the University of the Andes in Colombia. In June 2011, he also received an Honoris Causa Ph.D. title from the Université du Québec à Montréal in Canada. 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.