Amalia D. Kessler
Lewis Talbot and Nadine Hearn Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies
Biography
Professor (by courtesy) of History
A scholar whose research focuses on the evolution of commercial law and civil procedure, Amalia D. Kessler (MA ’96, PhD ’01) seeks to explore the roots of modern market culture and present-day process norms. Her new book is entitled Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800-1877 (under contract, Yale University Press). In 2008, her book, A Revolution in Commerce: The Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century France (Yale University Press, 2007), was awarded the American Historical Association’s J. Russell Major Prize for the best book in English on any aspect of French history. In 2011, she received the Hessel Yntema Prize from the American Society of Comparative Law for the “most outstanding” article by a scholar under 40 appearing in the previous year’s volume of the American Journal of Comparative Law. And in 2005, she received the Surrency Prize from the American Society for Legal History for the best article in the previous year’s volume of the Law and History Review.
Professor Kessler is the Jean-Paul Gimon Director of the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies and has an appointment (by courtesy) with the Stanford History Department. She has been a visiting professor at Yale Law School, Tel Aviv University Law School, the Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris II) and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2003, she was a trial attorney in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and clerked for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
title1
title2
title3
title4
Key Works
In the News
Related Areas of Interest
- BA Harvard University 1994
- MA Stanford University 1996
- JD Yale Law School 1999
- PhD (European history) Stanford University 2001
- Civil Procedure and Litigation
- Comparative Law
- Legal History