Publications

Presidential Constraints on Supreme Court Decision-Making. Journal of Politics 85, no. 1 (2023). (with Sharece Thrower, Vanderbilt University).

Separation of powers studies of judicial decision-making largely focus on congressional influences. Less attention is given to the role of presidents, which is surprising given their vast policymaking powers. Accordingly, we develop a new theory of how presidents influence the Supreme Court’s review of statutes, through potential legislative and administrative action. Using a dataset of all federal laws passed between 1948 and 2015, we find, like others, that judicial review is less likely to occur when the Court faces an ideologically hostile Congress. Unlike previous work, we reveal that such constraint is only effective when Congress is aligned with the president, who is less inclined to veto court-curbing legislation. We also find that the Court’s distance to the president is constraining given threats of non-enforcement, but only when the law is salient, the president and public align, and the president exerts more control over implementation.

The Influence of the President in the Adoption and Enforcement of Private Rights of Action. Presidential Studies Quarterly 51, no. 1 (2021): 187-213.

Litigation by private parties is authorized by dozens of federal statutes, resulting in thousands of lawsuits every year. Recent scholarship has suggested that Congress authorizes litigation by private parties to enforce federal law in order to limit the ability of the president to influence enforcement. I argue, however, that the apparent influence of presidential partisanship on adoption of private enforcement regimes is spurious, resulting from the increased use of this enforcement mechanism beginning in the 1960s. Further, I show that presidents meaningfully influence the rate of private litigation. Specifically, for statutes with liberal policy goals, litigation rates are substantially higher when a Democratic president is in office and when agencies are more politicized. Therefore, if Congress desires to insulate policy from the president, private enforcement regimes are unlikely to be a useful policy tool.

Motivating Litigants to Enforce Public Goods: Evidence from Employment, Housing, and Voting Discrimination Policy, In The Rights Revolution Revisited: Perspectives on the Role of Private Enforcement of Civil Rights in the United States, ed. Lynda Dodd. Cambridge University Press (2018).

The use of private litigation was a primary enforcement tool in civil rights statutes of the 1960s. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act allowed for individuals to sue employers who discriminated against them, and since 1964, hundreds of thousands of plaintiffs have made use of the opportunity. Yet, other private enforcement statutes have failed to mobilize a significant number of litigants. This paper describes the essential role that civil rights interest groups played in mobilizing plaintiffs in employment discrimination cases, and describes the reasons why interest groups declined to support more litigation in housing discrimination and voting dilution statutes. I argue that interest groups recognized the inherent weakness of private lawsuits as an enforcement tool for securing housing and voting rights, and therefore used their resources to support interest group led litigation, in the case of voting, and construction of new housing, primarily, in the case of housing. I also reinforce the importance of interest groups to private litigation, and argue that mobilization should be more central to narratives about interest group planned litigation.

Private Enforcement of Constitutional Guarantees in the Ku Klux Act of 1871, Constitutional Studies 1, no. 2 (2016): 81-95. 

When violations of constitutional guarantees are difficult to detect and enforce, Congress may be attracted to solutions which allow aggrieved individuals to bring their own actions to enforce the law, bypassing the need for federal enforcement efforts. While aggrieved individuals may be well-positioned to identify the constitutional harms perpetrated against them, it is much less clear that they have the resources and incentives necessary to advocate on their own behalf. The Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 demonstrates one such case. While members of Congress thought granting a private right of action would open the floodgates for protection of the new constitutional rights created by the Fourteenth Amendment, in fact, the vast majority of enforcement efforts were necessarily taken on by federal officials. It was not until much later that enterprising public interest lawyers revived the private enforcement regime, but in service to goals quite distant framer the intentions of the framers of the Ku Klux Klan Act. This development shows the weakness of private enforcement regimes in the absence of other support structures for litigation.

Working Papers

Organized Interests in Private Enforcement: Access and Success in Clean Water Lawsuits

The use of litigation to enforce federal laws has been subject to increasing focus by political scientists, but that research has been narrowly focused on private enforcement of employment discrimination. Additionally, while scholars have understood private enforcement as a type of state power, little attention has been given to the activities of the plaintiffs and interest groups who bring actions in courts to enforce the law. In order to give attention to how plaintiffs and interest groups interact with institutional contexts to create their own capacity to enforce the law, I reexamine the role of interest groups in creating and atmosphere conducive to private litigation in employment discrimination. Next, I examine how environmental interest groups’ use of litigation has differed from civil rights interest groups. Finally, this exploration of environmental interest group activity generates several hypotheses about the motivation of environmental citizen suits, which I test using two measures of private suits against polluters. I find that interest group activity makes up a substantial amount of environmental citizen suits, and interest groups use lawsuits in a partisan manner.

The Effect of Retrenchment Threat on Lawsuit Claiming (with Sarah Staszak)

Various studies have documented the ways that Congress can reign in the federal judiciary when it strays too far from Congressional preferences. Typically, these studies are focused on decisions that change doctrine, primarily in the Supreme Court. This research, however, misses one of the most effective tools that Congress has to appropriate a core judicial functions—the denial of access to courts altogether. Using an original dataset of Congressional proposals to limit medical malpractice lawsuits (1981-present), we argue that these proposals—even in the absence of successfully passed legislation—reduce litigation in the policy areas targeted by Congress. We explore the mechanisms that lead to decreasing litigation, considering judge-centered and lawyer-centered explanations. This suggests that Congress has significant power to shape legal policy, even without garnering sufficient votes for statutory changes to judicial power.