This fall, BC Law will welcome its newest Drinan Visiting Assistant Professor to campus. Ken-Terika “Kenni” Zellner joins the faculty after completing a joint JD/PhD program at Northwestern University last spring, where she held the Mellon Cluster Fellowship in Critical Theory.
Zellner succeeds Rebecca Horwitz-Willis, who has held a Drinan professorship for the last two years and who will begin a tenure track position as an assistant professor at the University of Mississippi School of Law.
As part of the Drinan Scholars Program, Zellner will begin a two-year appointment. The program provides emerging scholars with a highly sought after opportunity to build research, writing, and teaching experience to prepare for the law school faculty recruitment process. Prioritized are scholars who contribute to faculty diversity or who focus their teaching and research on issues related to inequality, including racial inequality, and the law.
Zellner successfully defended her PhD dissertation in the spring. “Judging Law: Kant, Intersubjectivity, and the Court” is a reframing of philosopher Immanuel Kant’s jurisprudence “to focus on the court as the site where judgment becomes visible and authoritative.” It argues that the act of judging is intersubjective in nature, as it makes claims about how others ought to judge, and helps to create norms regarding rights and responsibilities between people in the polity.
In addition to her interests in civil procedure and jurisprudence, Zellner is a social and political philosopher.
Zellner has worked for the Honorable Jorge Alonso of the US District Court of the Northern District of Illinois as a legal research and writing assistant, and has served as assistant chair of the Humanities Residential College at Northwestern.
“I feel immensely privileged to have been selected for the Drinan Visiting Assistant Professorship,” said Zellner. “From the moment I learned about the Drinan program, I knew that I wanted to be a part of the BC Law community. And my interview with its faculty only strengthened that desire. I feel that I have already built meaningful relationships here at BC, and I am excited to join your vibrant community this fall.”
Associate Dean of Faculty Paulo Barrozo commented on the success of the Drinan program in both recruiting exceptionally talented and promising young scholars and in helping place them in tenure-track faculty positions. “Dr. Zellner exemplifies the stature and promise of the talent we recruit to this program,” he stated, “in her case combining jurisprudence and civil procedure in imaginative and potentially impactful ways.”
The Drinan Scholars program supports two Visiting Assistant Professor positions at a time at BC Law, with one scholar rotating out each year to be able to welcome a new one. The other Drinan Scholar currently at BC Law is Akshat Agarwall, who will be in the position until his term ends at the end of the 2026-2027 academic year.