Dr. Kellen Funk

Biography

Kellen Funk is a legal historian specializing in civil procedure and remedies. He focuses on the written history of civil litigation practices in the U.S. and the development and reform of the American bail system, along with the juridical processes involving churches and religious groups. Funk joined the Columbia Law faculty in 2018, after completing his Ph.D. in American history at Princeton University, where he was a Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellow. His book, Lawyers’ Code, published by Oxford University Press in 2021, examines the 1848 enactment of New York’s Field Code and its impact on American civil procedure by merging law and equity, thus accelerating creditors’ remedies and giving lawyers supremacy over litigation rules. His scholarship integrates historical research methods with data science, leading to a project that digitizes paper filings from civil cases litigated in New York County during the 19th century. A frequent collaborator with Lincoln Mullen from George Mason University, Funk has published his findings on 19th-century legislative borrowings in the American Historical Review in 2018.

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