Michael Les Benedict

Michael Les Benedict is Emeritus Professor of History at The Ohio State University, where he taught from 1970 through 2004. He is also Visiting Scholar at OSU’s Moritz College of Law. Professor Benedict is the author of The Blessings of Liberty, a textbook on American constitutional history now in its third edition, as well as Sources in American Constitutional History, which is in its second edition. He has written several books on the constitutional history of the Civil War era, including The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson (1973), A Compromise of Principle (1974), and Preserving the Constitution: Essays on Politics and the Constitution in the Reconstruction Era (2006). He has also written dozens of articles on aspects of American legal and constitutional history. Professor Benedict is currently studying the role that Ohio senator, governor, and U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase played in the constitutional politics of the Civil War era.

Professor Benedict has held many prestigious research and teaching fellowships and has been visiting professor at history departments, American studies departments, and law schools in the United States, Japan, and England. He is an elected member of the Society of American Historians and a member of the presidentially appointed committee to administer the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States.