PERSON: Randall Kennedy

Michael R. Klein Professor of Law

Randall LeRoy Kennedy (born September 10, 1954) is an American legal scholar. He is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard University and his research focuses on the intersection of racial conflict and legal institutions in American life. He specializes in contracts, freedom of expression, race relations law, civil rights legislation, and the Supreme Court.

Kennedy has written seven books: Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption; Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word; Race, Crime, and the Law; Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal; The Persistence of the Color Line; For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law; and Say It Loud!: On Race, Law, History, and Culture. Kennedy has also published several collections of shorter works.

Randall LeRoy Kennedy was born on September 10, 1954, in Columbia, South Carolina, the middle child of Henry Kennedy Sr., a postal worker, and Rachel Kennedy, an elementary school teacher. He has two siblings, Henry H. Kennedy, Jr., a former United States District Court Judge for the District of Columbia, and Angela Kennedy, a lawyer at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. Kennedy has said that tales of racial oppression and racial resistance were staples of conversation in his household. His father often spoke of watching Thurgood Marshall argue Rice vs. Elmore, the case that invalidated the rule permitting only whites to vote in South Carolina’s Democratic primary. Later that decade, fleeing the abuses of Jim Crow, his parents moved to Washington, D.C.

Kennedy attended St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., and graduated cum laude with a B.A. in history from Princeton University in 1977 after completing an 135-page long senior thesis, “Richard Hofstadter: The Historian as Social Critic.” He then studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1977 to 1979 and at Yale Law School, where he received a J.D. in 1982. Kennedy served as an editor for the Yale Law Journal. He served as a law clerk for Judge J. Skelly Wright of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1982–83 and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court in 1983-84. He was admitted to the Washington, D.C. bar in 1983. He is a member of the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of both the American Philosophical Association and the American Philosophical Society.

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