Kent Newmyer received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Nebraska in 1959. From 1960 to 1997, he taught American history at the University of Connecticut. Since 1997, he has been a Professor of Law and History at the University of Connecticut School of Law. He has taught a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses in American history, specializing in the political, constitutional, and legal history of the early national period. He received two awards for teaching and in 1988 was named Distinguished Alumni Professor for excellence in teaching and scholarship, the highest faculty honor bestowed by the university.

As an author, Newmyer is best known for Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic (1985), and most recently, John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court (2001). A second edition of his short volume on The Supreme Court under Marshall and Taney was published in 2006. Newmyer's books have been reviewed in various history journals and law reviews, as well as in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New Republic. Newmyer has appeared on C-Span's “Booknotes,” and most recently was a commentator in a National Public Television documentary on the U.S. Supreme Court, produced by Channel 13 in New York City.  Newmyer's most recent book is The Treason Trial of Aaron Burr: Law, Politics and the Character Wars of the New Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2012).  His article on the Burr trial appears in the May/June 2013 issue of Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment For the Humanities.