Jeremy Kessler
I am a JD/PhD student at Yale’s Department of History and Yale Law School. My work focuses on the legal history of conscientious objection in the United States. I’m especially interested in the rise of what is called “selective conscientious objection” – a refusal to serve based not upon one’s opposition to war in any form, but upon one’s beliefs about the immorality or illegality of particular wars. Such selective objection challenges traditional notions of citizenship and sovereignty. I have subsidiary interests in American and European intellectual history, military and diplomatic history, and the history of human rights. Prior to my graduate work at Yale, I was a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge, where I studied the history of science.
