Amalia D. Kessler
Amalia D. Kessler
- Lewis Talbot and Nadine Hearn Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies
- Professor (by courtesy) of History
- Room N360, Neukom Building
Expertise
- Access to Justice
- Alternative Dispute Resolution
- Civil Procedure & Litigation
- Comparative Law
- Federal Courts & Federal Jurisdiction
- Law & Society
- Legal History
- Mediation & Dispute Resolution
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 (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2016). 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.
Education
- BA Harvard University 1994
- MA Stanford University 1996
- JD Yale Law School 1999
- PhD (European history) Stanford University 2001
Courses
Affiliations & Honors
- Invited Member, Editorial Board of Law and Social Inquiry (2013-2015)
- Invited Member, Editorial Board of Law and History Review (2013-2015)
- Invited Member, Editorial Board of Studies in the History of Law and Justice (Springer, starting 2013)
- Invited Member, Herbert Jacob Book Prize Committee, Law and Society Association (2013)
- Elected Associate Member, International Academy of Comparative Law (starting 2012)
- Invited Member, Executive Committee of the American Society for Legal History (2011-2014)
- Elected Member, Board of Directors of the American Society for Legal History (2011-2014)
- Co-Chair, Program Committee of the American Society for Legal History (2011)
- Invited Member, J. Willard Hurst Book Prize Committee, Law and Society Association (2011)
- Elected Member, Executive Committee of the American Society of Comparative Law (2009-10; 2010-11)
- Elected Member, Nominating Committee of the American Society for Legal History (2008-2010)
- Co-Director, Law and History Workshop, Stanford Humanities Center (2008-09)
- Associate Editor (Book Reviews, Non-Americas), Law and History Review (2007-2012)
- Chair, American Association of Law Schools Section on Comparative Law (2010)
- Elected Member, Executive Committee of the American Association of Law Schools Section on Comparative Law (2007-09)
- Invited Member, Program Committee of the American Society for Legal History (2006; 2010)
- Manuscript Reviewer, Yale University Press; Oxford University Press; Law and History Review; The Journal of Economic History; Law and Social Inquiry; The Journal of Modern History; Journal of Law, Economics and Organization
- Grant/Fellowship Reviewer, Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship Program; Agence nationale de la recherche (France)
- Director/Editor (representing Stanford), American Society of Comparative Law
- Local Organizer, Annual Meeting of Mouvement Jeune Notariat (organization of French notaries/transactional lawyers), San Francisco, CA (Nov. 18-24, 2007)
- Member, American Society for Legal History, Law and Society Association, American Historical Association, & Society for French Historical Studies
- Admitted to New York and Massachusetts Bars (2000)
- Recipient, Violet Andrews Whittier Fellowship, Stanford Humanities Center (2013-14)
- Winner, Hessel Yntema Prize, awarded by the American Society of Comparative Law for the “most outstanding” article by a scholar under 40 appearing in volume 58 of the American Journal of Comparative Law (2011)
- Winner, J. Russell Major Prize, awarded by the American Historical Association for the best book in English on any aspect of French history (2008)
- Invitee, Workshop on Common Law Legal Transplants, Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University (May-August 2008)
- Recipient, Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies (2007-2008), supporting one year of research
- Recipient, 2005 Surrency Prize for "Enforcing Virtue: Social Norms and Self-Interest in an Eighteenth-Century Merchant Court, 22 Law and History Review 71 (2004)
- Recipient, Special Commendation Award, U.S. Department of Justice (December 2002)
- Recipient, Performance Award, U.S. Department of Justice (December 2002)
- Recipient, Star Award for legal representation, U.S. Department of the Interior (September 2002)
- Recipient, Dean’s Research Funds—research on 18th-century French merchant law and practice (Cambridge, MA, Summer-Fall 1999)
- Recipient, Yale Center for Studies in Law, Economics & Public Policy/Olin Research Grant—research in 18th-century merchant-court archives (Paris, Summer 1997 )
- Recipient, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Scholarship (Regensburg, Summer 1995)
- Recipient, Carolyn E. Agger Endowment for Women in Law, Postgraduate Grant
- Recipient, Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Summer Research
- Recipient, Lucy Allen Patton Senior Prize
- Recipient, John Harvard and Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Scholarships
- Recipient, Detur Prize
- Recipient, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies Research Grant
Key Works
News
Why Do Courts Still Deliver Many Legal Documents By Hand?
National Public Radio (NPR)
Professor Amalia Kessler contributes to a program on NPR on the practice of serving legal documents in person, as opposed to through more modern methods, like the Internet. A judge in New York recently allowed one woman to serve her husband divorce papers through Facebook. The case made national news because this…
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