Duncan Kennedy is the Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence Emeritus at Harvard Law School. He was a founding member of the Critical Legal Studies movement. Kennedy received an A.B. in Economics from Harvard College in 1964 and in 1970 earned an LL.B. from Yale Law School. After completing a clerkship with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Kennedy joined the Harvard Law School faculty in 1971 as an Assistant Professor, becoming a full Professor in 1976 and retired in 2017. He has taught contracts, torts, property, trusts, the history of legal thought, low income housing law and policy, law and development, Israel/Palestine legal issues, the globalization of law and legal thought, and the politics of private law in comparative perspective.

His publications have contributed to legal and social theory, comparative law, the history of legal thought, legal semiotics, law and economics, contract law, and legal education. His five books are: Legal Reasoning: Collected Essays (Davies Group Publishers 2008); The Rise and Fall of Classical Legal Thought (Beard Books, 1998 [1975]); A Critique of Adjudication [fin de siècle] (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1997); Sexy Dressing, etc. (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1993); and Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy (AFAR, Cambridge, 1983).