Contact Information

Biography

I am Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies and a Research Fellow in the Centre for Studies on Democracy and Diversity at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

My research and teaching interests are in the politics of law and courts, with a focus on the United States and, increasingly, Canada. My work sits at the intersection of judicial politics, American political development, legislative studies, and law and society. My research examines how courts operate within—and are constrained by—the broader separation of powers. One line of this work studies the role of the president and executive branch in shaping U.S. Supreme Court decision making. My Canadian work examines how Parliament constrains constitutional review in the Supreme Court of Canada, including ongoing work on the politics of the Charter's notwithstanding clause. In other research, I examine the effectiveness of private enforcement statutes—U.S. federal laws in which the primary mechanism of enforcement is private litigation rather than direct bureaucratic action.

My work has appeared in the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and Constitutional Studies, among others.