Ken Kersch and the New Legal History: Beyond the Internalist/Externalist Divide

The death of Kenneth Ira Kersch on November 27, 2024, was dev-astating to the family, friends, and students of the late Boston College political scientist. So too was Kersch’s passing a tremendous loss for scholars of American constitutionalism, many of who awaited his com-pletion of a planned, three-volume series on the subject. But over the course of his twenty-five-year career, Ken Kersch taught his students and colleagues much about the Constitution and the culture in which that creedal document was—and is—embedded. In recognition of Kersch’s contributions to the fields of political science, history, and law, this symposium therefore brings together leading and emerging schol-ars in all three fields to reflect on Kersch’s legacy. To introduce this symposium, this essay first describes the meth-odological debates that shaped scholarly thinking around the time of Kersch’s intellectual formation as a graduate student about how best to understand the conditions under which constitutional change occurs. Then, this essay explores how Kersch’s two most well-known mono-graphs—Constructing Civil Liberties and Conservatives and the Constitution—responded to and attempted to move beyond those de-bates. And in concluding, this essay identifies one enduring methodological lesson of Kersch’s “new legal history”—namely, that scholars ought to foreground the “constitutional imaginations” of the legal advocates and advocacy institutions that most directly mediate ju-dicial decision-makers’ relationships to broader social and political movements.