Kellen R. Funk is a legal historian with expertise in civil procedure and remedies. He has written on the history of civil litigation practices in the U.S., the development and reform of the American bail system, and the juridical processes of 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 first book, The Lawyers’ Code, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2021. It explores how the 1848 enactment of New York’s Field Code shaped the field of American civil procedure by merging law and equity, accelerating creditors’ remedies, and giving lawyers supremacy over the rules of litigation.

Funk’s scholarship combines historical research methods with data science, and he is piloting a project to digitize the paper filings for nearly every civil case litigated in New York County in the 19th century. Along with his frequent collaborator Lincoln Mullen (George Mason University), Funk published his findings on 19th-century legislative borrowings in the American Historical Review in 2018.