I am the David and Mary Winton Green Professor at the University of Chicago. I am generally interested in the non-democratic uses and consequences of democratic political institutions. My research and teaching interests are in the political economy of judicial politics, policing and public safety, as well as applied formal theory and statistical methodology. My current research is focused on two areas. The first is information and policy-making, and is concerned with how institutions work in tandem to shape the content of political outputs. The second is public safety and the use of force by the state against civilians. On this webpage, you will find links to information about my past and on-going research projects, which also touch on the politics of law-enforcement and criminal justice, judicial learning and rule-making, interactions among actors within the judiciary, representation on the courts, empirical techniques for estimating judicial preferences and the content of judicial decisions, and the interaction between the judiciary and other institutions.
In 2019, I completed a book, The Supreme Court: An Analytic History of Constitutional Decision Making, which studies the history of constitutional decision-making by the Supreme Court and has been published in Cambridge University Press Series in Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions. My first book, The Limits of Judicial Independence, was also published in the Series in Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions at Cambridge University Press and won the 2012 William H. Riker Award for the best book in political economy from the Political Economy Section of the American Political Science Association. I co-authored Judicial Decision-Making: A Cousrebook, published by West Academic in 2020. I have published articles across my research interests in journals including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Nature: Human Behavior, Political Analysis, the Journal of Law, Economics & Organization, Political Research Quarterly, the Journal of Theoretical Politics, Political Science Research & Methods, the Journal of Law & Courts, the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, the Wisconsin Law Review, and the Criminal Law Bulletin.
I am also currently Editor of The Journal of Law & Courts, the flagship journal of the Law & Courts section of the American Political Science Association. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, I was the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Political Science at Emory University. I have also held visiting appointments as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 2022-2023, a Senior Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University in 2015-2016, and a visiting research scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Toulouse School of Economics in 2016. I was the Formal Theory and Methodology Field Editor of the Journal of Politics from 2019 through 2020. I received my B.A. (2003) in Political Science from Rutgers University and my M.A. (2005) and Ph.D. (2008) in Politics from Princeton University. I have also provided consulting services in constitutional litigation for cases before the US Supreme Court and in the Georgia State courts.
My Erdős number is 4.