My research focuses on freedom of expression, constitutional courts, democratic backsliding, and the use of legal strategies by movements for social change, on both the left and the right.

With support from the US National Science Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and Fritt Ord (a Norwegian foundation), I am currently leading a collaborative investigation of the political beneficiaries of free expression jurisprudence worldwide. To date, I have published papers from this project in the Journal of Law & Courts, Law & Social Inquiry (and here), Constitutional Studies, Laws, and the American University International Law Review. 

I have also published a series of papers investigating democratic backsliding in the United States, with particular attention to the role of courts, including an early assessment of President Trump’s efforts to undermine U.S. constitutional democracy, a historically informed analysis of Court packing in the U.S., and a broad engagement with the literature on democratic erosion, backsliding, and abuse.

A full list of publications is available in my curriculum vitae, and many of these papers are available for download at SSRN or Google Scholar. My 2004 book, The Most Activist Supreme Court in History, is available here and here. Some of the data in the book is updated through June 2013 here. My 2014 book, Judicial Politics in Polarized Times, is available here and here.