Is America Governable?

Lynn Baker (University of Texas School of Law)

One of the nation’s leading scholars on issues of professional responsibility in group litigation, Professor Baker is also a leading academic defender of federalism and the rights of states. She is frequently called upon by lawyers and legislators to serve as an expert on issues of legal ethics, state and local government law, and federalism.

Professor Baker is the co-author of a leading law school text, Local Government Law: Cases and Materials (Foundation Press, 4th ed. 2010) (with Clayton P. Gillette), and the author or co-author of dozens of articles and book chapters, including “Facts About Fees: Lessons for Legal Ethics” (Texas Law Review, 2002); “I Cut, You Choose: The Role of Plaintiffs’ Counsel in Allocating Settlement Proceeds” (Virginia Law Review, 1998) (with Charles Silver); “Conditional Federal Spending After Lopez” (Columbia Law Review, 1995); and “Federalism and the Double Standard of Judicial Review” (Duke Law Journal, 2001) (with Ernest A. Young).

Jack Balkin (Yale Law School)

Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School and the founder and director of Yale’s Information Society Project, an interdisciplinary center that studies law and the new information technologies, as well as the director of the Knight Law and Media Program at Yale. He was a member of the University of Texas Law Faculty from 1988 to 1994.

Professor Balkin is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the author of over a hundred articles in different fields including constitutional theory, Internet law, freedom of speech, reproductive rights, jurisprudence, and the theory of ideology. He writes political and legal commentary at Balkinization, and has written widely on legal issues for such publications as the New York Times, the New England Journal of Medicine, the American Prospect, Washington Monthly, the New Republic Online, and Slate. In addition to Constitutional Redemption, his books include The Constitution in 2020 (with Reva Siegel); Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (5th ed. with Brest, Levinson, Amar, and Siegel); Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology; The Laws of Change: I Ching and the Philosophy of Life; What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said; and What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said.

Sarah Binder (Brookings Institution)

Sarah Binder is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and professor of political science at George Washington University, where she specializes in Congress and Legislative politics.

She is the co-author with Forrest Maltzman of Advice and Dissent: The Struggle to Shape the Federal Judiciary (Brookings, 2009), author of Stalemate: Causes and Consequences of Legislative Gridlock (Brookings, 2003), Minority Rights, Majority Rule:Partisanship and the Development of Congress (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and co-author with Steven S. Smith of Politics or Principle? Filibustering in the United States Senate (Brookings, 1997). She is also co-editor of The Legislative Branch (Oxford University Press, 2005) and The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions (2006). Her book on legislative gridlock was awarded the Richard F. Fenno, Jr. Prize by the American Political Science Association for the best book published on legislative politics in 2003. Her other work on congressional politics has appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and elsewhere. Her current project focuses on Congress’s response to financial crisis, including a study of Congress’s relationship with the Federal Reserve.

Philip Bobbitt (University of Texas School of Law)

One of the nation’s leading constitutional theorists, Professor Bobbitt’s interests include not only constitutional law but also international security and the history of strategy. He has published six books: Tragic Choices (with Calabresi) (1978), Constitutional Fate (1982), Democracy and Deterrence (1987), U.S. Nuclear Strategy (with Freedman and Treverton) (1989), Constitutional Interpretation (1991), The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (Knopf, 2002) and, most recently, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (Knopf, 2008).

Bruce Cain (Stanford University)

Bruce E. Cain is a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and Director Designate of the Bill Lane Center for the American West. He received a BA from Bowdoin College (1970), a B Phil. from Oxford University (1972) as a Rhodes Scholar, and a Ph D from Harvard University (1976). He taught at Caltech (1976-89) and UC Berkeley (1989-2012) before coming to Stanford. Professor Cain was Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley from 1990-2007 and Executive Director of the UC Washington Center from 2005-2012. He was elected the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000 and has won awards for his research (Richard F. Fenno Prize, 1988), teaching (Caltech 1988 and UC Berkeley 2003) and public service (Zale Award for Outstanding Achievement in Policy Research and Public Service, 2000).

His areas of expertise include political regulation, applied democratic theory, representation and state politics. Some of Professor Cain’s most recent publications include “Malleable Constitutions: Reflections on State Constitutional Design,” coauthored with Roger Noll in University of Texas Law Review, volume 2, 2009; “More or Less: Searching for Regulatory Balance,” in Race, Reform and the Political Process, edited by Heather Gerken, Guy Charles and Michael Kang, CUP, 2011; and “Redistricting Commissions: A Better Political Buffer?” in The Yale Law Journal, volume 121, 2012. He is currently working on a book about political reform in the US.

Ernesto Cortes (Industrial Areas Foundation)

Ernesto Cortés, Jr. is the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) co-chair and executive director of the West / Southwest regional network.  The IAF provides leadership training and civics education to poor and moderate-income people across the US and UK. Cortés has been instrumental in the building of over 30 grassroots organizations known for developing and training community leaders

John Dinan (Wake Forest University)

John Dinan’s research focuses on state constitutionalism, federalism, and American political development. He is the author of several books, including The American State Constitutional Tradition and Keeping the People’s Liberties: Legislators, Citizens, and Judges as Guardians of Rights. He is currently the chair of the Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations Section of the American Political Science Association.

Mickey Edwards (Aspen Institute)

Mickey Edwards was a member of Congress for 16 years, during which time he was a senior member of the House Budget  and Appropriations committees and a senior member of the Republican leadership (chairman of the Republican Policy Committee). After leaving Congress he taught at Harvard for eleven years and at Princeton for five years before becoming a Vice President of the Aspen Institute. He has chaired task forces for the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution, served as an advisor to the State Department, was a regular political columnist for the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, and broadcast a weekly political commentary on NPR’s “All Things Considered”. His  two most recent books are “Reclaiming Conservatism” (Oxford) and “The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats Into Americans” (Yale).

John Ferejohn (NYU)

“While governmental institutions and institutional practices had long been central to traditional political science,” observes John Ferejohn, a Professor of Law and Politics at NYU, “this focus was lost in the 1950s as the disciplines embraced the newer behavioral research methods that have been developed in psychology and sociology.” This loss of focus meant that political scientists shifted their attention away from the structures and practices of political and legal institutions and how they interacted. In order to rebuild the interdisciplinary interactions between Law and Political Science, it is vital to revitalize the discipline’s focus on political and legal institutions, while retaining and expanding its use of the innovative methodologies of modern social science.

Ferejohn’s primary areas of scholarly interest include the development of positive political theory and especially its application to the study of legal and political institutions and behavior. His current research focuses on Congress and policy making, courts within the separation of powers system, constitutional adjudication from a comparative perspective, democratic theory and law, and the philosophy of social science.

James Fishkin (Stanford University)

James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he teaches Communication and Political Science. He is the author of When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation (Oxford, 2009) as well as The Voice of the People (Yale, 1995), Democracy and Deliberation (Yale 1991) and co-author with Bruce Ackerman of Deliberation Day  (Yale 2004). He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He is Director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University (http://cdd.stanford.edu). He holds both a PhD in political science from Yale and a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge University. He is most well-known for Deliberative Polling, a form of public consultation in which scientific samples are polled before and after they deliberate about an issue under transparently good conditions. About 70 of these projects have taken place in 18 countries, including the US, Japan, China, Korea, Britain, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary.

Joseph Fishkin (University of Texas Law School)

Professor Fishkin’s research and teaching interests include employment discrimination, election law, education law, constitutional law, torts, and distributive justice. He is particularly interested in questions of equality and equal opportunity at the intersection of law and political theory. His most recent essay, Weightless Votes, appeared in the Yale Law Journal in Spring 2012. His book, Opening the Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity, will be published in 2013 by Oxford University Press (chapters available on request). He is currently at work on an article on the anti-bottleneck principle in employment discrimination law.

Edward Foley (Moritz School of Law)

Edward B. Foley, the Chief Justice Thomas J. Moyer Professor for the Administration of Justice and the Rule of Law, is the Director of Election Law @ Moritz. He is also serves as a Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Election Law Project.

Professor Foley’s teaching and scholarship covers the full field of election law. His current research focuses the resolution of vote-counting disputes, and his recent publications include a three-part series in the ELECTION LAW JOURNAL (volume 10) on Minnesota’s 2008 U.S. Senate election: The Lake Wobegone Recount (pp. 129-164), How Fair Can Be Faster (pp. 187-226), and The Tale of Two Teams (pp. 475-482).

On September 14, 2012, Professor Foley delivered the keynote address, entitled Virtue over Party: An Example of Electoral Heroism and Why It Matters, at a symposium at the University of California, Irvine.

John Fortier (Bipartisan Policy Center)

John C. Fortier joined the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) in April 2011. He is a political scientist who focuses on governmental and electoral institutions.

Prior to coming to BPC, he was a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he also served as the principal contributor to the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project, the executive director of the Continuity of Government Commission, and the project manager of the Transition to Governing Project. He was also a regular contributor to AEI’s Election Watch series. He also served as the director of the Center for the Study of American Democracy at Kenyon College.

He is the author of Absentee and Early Voting: Trends, Promises and Perils (AEI Press: 2006), author and editor of After the People Vote: A Guide to the Electoral College, and author and co-editor with Norman Ornstein of Second Term Blues: How George W. Bush Has Governed (Brookings Press: 2007), and numerous academic articles in political science and law journals.

William Galston (Brookings Institution)

William A. Galston holds the Ezra Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, where he serves as a senior fellow. A former policy advisor to President Clinton and presidential candidates, Galston is an expert on domestic policy, political campaigns, and elections. His current research focuses on designing a new social contract and the implications of political polarization.

He is also College Park Professor at the University of Maryland. Prior to January 2006, he was Saul Stern Professor and Acting Dean at the School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, founding director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), and executive director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal, co-chaired by William Bennett and Sam Nunn. A participant in six presidential campaigns, he served from 1993 to 1995 as Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Domestic Policy.

Galston is the author of eight books and more than 100 articles in the fields of political theory, public policy, and American politics. His most recent books are Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge, 2002), The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (Cambridge, 2004), and Public Matters (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). A winner of the American Political Science Association’s Hubert H. Humphrey Award, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.

Heather Gerken (Yale Law School)

Heather Gerken is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School where she specializes in election law, constitutional law, and civil procedure. Professor Gerken is one of the country’s leading experts on voting rights and election law, the role of groups in the democratic process, and the relationship between diversity and democracy. A native of Massachusetts, Professor Gerken graduated from Princeton University, where she received her A.B. degree summa cum laude in 1991, and from the University of Michigan Law School, where she received her J.D. summa cum laude in 1994. She then served as a law clerk for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for Justice David H. Souter of the United States Supreme Court, before entering private practice in Washington, D.C. In 2000 Professor Gerken became an assistant professor at Harvard Law School, where she was granted tenure and won the Sachs-Freund teaching award. She joined the Yale faculty in 2006. She is currently working on a book on the trans-substantive concept of “second-order diversity” in American public law.

Jacob Gersen (Harvard Law School)

Jacob E. Gersen is a leading expert in administrative law, legislation and constitutional theory. A gifted political scientist as well as lawyer, he has investigated the optimal timing of legislative action, timing and deadlines within administrative agencies, the potential effects of dividing government functions in new ways, patterns in business litigation, and he is hard at work on studies of spending and political control of government. Gersen’s most recent scholarship includes a chapter on “Designing Agencies,” in the Research Handbook in Public Law and Public Choice (Farber & O’Connell, eds., 2010). He has written and co-written articles in the Virginia, University of Chicago, Stanford, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, New York University and Harvard law reviews, including collaborations with HLS Professor Adrian Vermeule ’93 and Chicago Law Professor Eric A. Posner ’91. Gersen also serves as a referee for the journals of Law & Economics, Politics, Political Philosophy, Legal Studies, and the American Journal of Political Science. He is currently researching articles on agency spending and political control of the bureaucracy; the implications of election timing for public policy; and administrative law of money.

James Gibson (Washington Univ of St. Louis)

James L. Gibson is the Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government in the Department of Political Science and Professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.  He is also the Director of the Program on Citizenship and Democratic Values and Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy, and Professor Extraordinary in Political Science, and Fellow, Centre for Comparative and International Politics, Stellenbosch University (South Africa). Gibson’s research interests are in Law and Politics, Comparative Politics, and American Politics. He is currently working on an extensive research agenda investigating the legitimacy of institutions (especially courts, state and federal), a study of public reactions to the trials of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and a longitudinal study of political freedom and intolerance in the United States. Two of Gibson’s books were published in 2009: Citizens, Courts, and Confirmations: Positivity Theory and the Judgments of the American People(Princeton) and Overcoming Historical Injustices: Land Reconciliation in South Africa (Cambridge). The latter is the final entry in Gibson’s South African “Overcoming Trilogy.” In 2009, Gibson was the James B. McClatchy Visiting Professor at the Stanford Law School. His Electing Judges: The Surprising Effects of Campaigning on Judicial Legitimacy will be published in 2012 by the University of Chicago Press. In 2011, Gibson received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association (honoring “a distinguished career of scholarly achievement”).

Stephen Griffin (Tulane Law School)

Professor Griffin joined the faculty in 1989 after serving as a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago and research instructor in law at New York University.  He has published over 30 articles, book chapters, and reviews focusing on constitutional law and theory.  He published American Constitutionalism: From Theory to Politics in 1996 with Princeton University Press and coedited a reader, Constitutional Theory: Arguments and Perspectives with Lexis in 2007.  In 2000, he received the Sumter Marks Award in recognition of his publications.  In 2002, he received the Felix Frankfurter Distinguished Teaching Award from the graduating class.  He is a member of the American Political Science Association and helped organize a joint AALS/APSA Conference on Constitutional Law held in 2002.  He was chair of the AALS section on Constitutional Law for 2006.  He served as Vice Dean of Academic Affairs from 2001-04 and 2006-09 and as Interim Dean during 2009-10. His book, Long Wars and the Constitution: Presidents and the Constitutional Order from Truman to Obama, will be published by Harvard University Press in 2013.

Richard Hasen (Univ of California at Irvine)

Professor Richard L. Hasen is the Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine. Hasen is a nationally-recognized expert in election law and campaign finance regulation, and is co-author of a leading casebook on election law.

From 2001-2010, he served (with Dan Lowenstein) as founding co-editor of the quarterly peer-reviewed publication, Election Law Journal. He is the author of more than 80 articles on election law issues, published in numerous journals including the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review and Supreme Court Review. He was elected to the American Law Institute in 2009.

His op-eds and commentaries have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and Slate. Hasen also writes the often-quoted Election Law Blog. His newest book, The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown, was published in summer 2012 by Yale University Press.

Lawrence Lessig (Harvard Law School)

Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Prior to rejoining the Harvard faculty, Lessig was a professor at Stanford Law School, where he founded the school’s Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.

Lessig serves on the Board of Creative Commons, MapLight, Brave New Film Foundation, The American Academy, Berlin, AXA Research Fund and iCommons.org, and on the advisory board of the Sunlight Foundation. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Association, and has received numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, Fastcase 50 Award and being named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries.

Sanford Levinson (University of Texas School of Law)

Sanford Levinson, W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood Jr. Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School and Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin, is the author of over 350 articles and book reviews in professional and popular journals, as well as a regular contributor to the popular blog Balkinization.  His most recent book is Framed:  America’s 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance (2012).  He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association in 2010.

Adam Liptak (New York Times)

Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court for The New York Times.  His column on legal affairs, “Sidebar,” appears every other Tuesday.

Liptak was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting in 2009 for “American Exception,” a series of articles examining ways in which the American legal system differs from those of other developed nations.  He received the 2010 Scripps Howard Award for Washington reporting for a five-part series on the Roberts Court.

A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, Liptak practiced law at a large New York City law firm and in the legal department of The New York Times Company before joining the paper’s news staff in 2002.

His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Business Week and Rolling Stone, and he has published law review articles in The Arizona Law Review, The Michigan Law Review and The New York University Annual Survey of American Law.

He has taught courses on media law and the Supreme Court at Yale Law School, Columbia University School of Journalism, U.C.L.A School of Law and University of California Gould School of Law.

Thomas Mann (Brookings Institution)

Thomas E. Mann is the W. Averell Harriman Chair and senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution. Between 1987 and 1999, he was Director of Governmental Studies at Brookings. Before that, Mann was executive director of the American Political Science Association.

Mann has taught at Princeton University, Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, the University of Virginia and American University; conducted polls for congressional candidates; worked as a consultant to IBM and the Public Broadcasting Service; chaired the Board of Overseers of the National Election Studies; and served as an expert witness in the constitutional defense of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. He lectures frequently in the United States and abroad on American politics and public policy and is also a regular contributor to newspaper stories and television and radio programs on politics and governance.

He and Norman Ornstein in 2008 published an updated edition of The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Oxford University Press). Their new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, was published by Basic Books on May 1, 2012.

Jane Mansbridge (Harvard University)

Jane J. Mansbridge, Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, is the author of Beyond Adversary Democracy, an empirical and normative study of face-to-face democracy, and the award-winning Why We Lost the ERA, a study of anti-deliberative dynamics in social movements based on organizing for an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. She is also editor or coeditor of the volumesBeyond Self-Interest,Feminism, and Oppositional Consciousness. Her current work includes studies of representation, democratic deliberation, everyday activism, and the public understanding of collective action problems.

David Mayhew (Yale University)

David Mayhew is Sterling Professor of Political Science. He has been an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Hoover National Fellow, a Sherman Fairchild Fellow at the California Institute of Technology, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a member of the American Political Science Association National Council, a member of the board of overseers of the National Election Studies of the Center for Political Studies and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 2000-2001, he was John M. Olin Visiting Professor in American Government at Nuffield College, Oxford. His research concerns U.S. legislative behavior, U.S. political parties, and U.S. policymaking. Publications include: Party Loyalty Among Congressmen; Congress: The Electoral Connection; Congressional Elections: The Case of the Vanishing Marginals; Placing Parties in American Politics; Divided We Govern; America’s Congress: Actions in the Public Sphere, James Madison through Newt Gingrich; Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre; Parties and Policies: How the American Government Works; and Partisan Balance: Why Political Parties Don’t Kill the U.S. Constitutional System.

Thomas McGarity (University of Texas School of Law)

A former Articles Editor of the Texas Law Review, Professor McGarity is a leading scholar in the fields of both administrative law and environmental law. He also teaches torts. He has written five influential books: The Preemption War: When Federal Bureaucracies Trump Local Juries, (Yale University Press 2008), Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research, (Harvard University Press 2008) (co-author), Workers at Risk (Praeger, 1993) (co-author), The Law of Environmental Protection (West, 2nd ed., 1991) (co-author), and Reinventing Rationality: The Role of Regulatory Analysis in the Federal Bureaucracy (Cambridge, 1991). His recent articles include “Hazardous Air Pollutants, Migrating Hot Spots, and the Prospect of Data-Driven Regulation of Complex Industrial Complexes,” 86 Tex. L. Rev. 1445 (2008). He is the immediate past president of the Center for Progressive Reform.

David Orentlicher (Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law)

A scholar of constitutional law and a former state representative, David Orentlicher is author of the forthcoming book, Two Presidents Are Better than One: The Case for a Bipartisan Executive Branch (NYU Press 2013). In Two Presidents, Orentlicher traces political dysfunction in Washington to the founding fathers’ decision to place a single person atop the executive branch and shows how shared governance can defuse partisan conflict and improve decision making in the Oval Office. He also has published articles in leading law reviews on affirmative action, freedom of speech and the separation of powers.

Orentlicher also brings to his scholarship a background in medicine and ethics.  Trained in both law and medicine, he published Matters of Life and Death with Princeton University Press and has written widely in leading legal and medical journals on critical issues in medical ethics. Before coming to IU, he served as director of the Division of Medical Ethics at the American Medical Association for six-and-a-half years. While there, he led the drafting of the AMA’s first patients’ bill of rights and guidelines on conflicts of interest, end-of-life matters, organ transplantation and reproductive issues that have been incorporated into federal law or cited by courts and government agencies in their decision-making. He also held adjunct appointments at the University of Chicago Law School and Northwestern University Medical School and more recently been a distinguished visiting professor of bioethics at Princeton University.

As a member of the Indiana House of Representatives from November 2002 to November 2008, Orentlicher authored legislation to make health care insurance more affordable, increase the pool of venture capital for new businesses, and ensure better protection of children from abuse and neglect.

Norman Ornstein (American Enterprise Institute)

Norman Ornstein is a long-time observer of Congress and politics. He writes a weekly column for Roll Call called “Congress Inside Out” and is an election eve analyst for CBS News. He served as codirector of the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project and participates in AEI’s Election Watch series. He also served as a senior counselor to the Continuity of Government Commission. Mr. Ornstein led a working group of scholars and practitioners that helped shape the law, known as McCain-Feingold, that reformed the campaign financing system. He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004. His many books include The Permanent Campaign and Its Future (AEI Press, 2000); The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track, with Thomas E. Mann (Oxford University Press, 2006, named by the Washington Post one of the best books of 2006 and called by the Economist “a classic”); and, most recently, the New York Times bestseller, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, also with Tom Mann, published in May by Basic Books.

Scot Powe (University of Texas School of Law)

A leading historian of the Supreme Court, Professor Powe clerked for Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas before joining the Texas faculty in 1971. His latest book is The Supreme Court and The American Elite, 1789-2008 (2009). Previously , reflecting a split career as a historian and a First Amendment scholar, especially of the electronic media, his three award-winning books were American Broadcasting and the First Amendment (California 1987), The Fourth Estate and the Constitution (California 1991), and The Warren Court and American Politics (Harvard 2000). Additionally he has co-authored Regulating Broadcast Programming (MIT 1994) and written scores of articles. Powe was also a principal commentator on the 2007 four-part PBS series “The Supreme Court.” He is also a Professor of Government and has been a visiting professor at Berkeley, Connecticut, and Georgetown.

Jack Rakove (Stanford University)

Jack Rakove is the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and professor of political science and (by courtesy) law at Stanford, where he has taught since 1980. His principal areas of research include the origins of the American Revolution and Constitution, the political practice and theory of James Madison, and the role of historical knowledge in constitutional litigation. He is the author of six books, including Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (1996), which won the Pulitzer Prize in History, and Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (2010), which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize, and the editor of seven others, including The Unfinished Election of 2000 (2001). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and a past president of the Society for the History of the Early American Republic.

Mark Rosen (Chicago-Kent School of Law)

Professor Rosen joined IIT Chicago-Kent in the fall of 1999, and was a Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School in 2005-06. One of Professor Rosen’s articles received the 2005 Outstanding Scholarly Paper Award from the Association of American Law Schools. He has a B.A. in economics and political science from Yale College and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was articles editor of the Harvard Law Review. From 1988 to 1991, he studied Talmudic and comparative law at Shapell’s University in Israel.

Prior to joining the IIT Chicago-Kent faculty, Professor Rosen was a Bigelow Fellow and lecturer in law at the University of Chicago Law School. From 1994 to 1997, he was an attorney at the law firm of Foley, Hoag & Eliot in Boston, where he focused on complex federal court litigation. Professor Rosen’s scholarly interests include constitutional law, state and local government, civil procedure, conflicts of law, federal courts, and Federal Indian law. He has published in the Harvard Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review (twice), the California Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Texas Law Review, the Minnesota Law Review (twice), the University of Chicago Law Review, the William and Mary Law Review, the Wisconsin Law Review, Chicago-Kent Law Review, Emory Law Journal, the Journal of Law and Politics, Constitutional Commentary, and the Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues, among others. He teaches constitutional law, civil procedure, state and local government law, Federal Indian Law, conflicts of law, and contracts.

Elizabeth Sherman (American University)

Professor Sherman brings over two decades of teaching, research and administrative experience to her classes in American Politics. As founding director of the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Dr. Sherman established the focal point for graduate education, research and public engagement on issues concerning women in public life. A former Research Fellow at the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, Dr. Sherman completed research on economic challenges facing women in the workplace, and the potential for statewide policies on family leave and comparable worth. Dr. Sherman hosted her own award-winning public radio program, Commonwealth Journal, and has spoken and written widely on women in politics.

Stephen Skowronek (Yale University)

Stephen Skowronek is the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University. He has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and has held the Chair in American Civilization at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His research concerns American national institutions and American political history. His publications include Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (1982), The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton, (1997), The Search for American Political Development (2004, with Karen Orren), and Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraisal (2008). Among other activities, he was co-founder of the journal Studies in American Political Development, which he edited between 1986 and 2007, and he provided the episode structure and thematic content for the PBS miniseries: The American President (Kunhardt Productions).

Evan Smith (Texas Tribune)

Evan Smith is the CEO and editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune. Previously he spent nearly 18 years at Texas Monthly, stepping down in August 2009 as the magazine’s president and editor-in-chief. He previously served as editor for more than eight years — only the third person to hold that title. On his watch, Texas Monthly was nominated for 16 National Magazine Awards, the magazine industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, and twice was awarded the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. For eight years, he hosted the Lone Star Emmy Award-winning weekly interview program Texas Monthly Talks, which aired on PBS stations statewide. He currently hosts Overheard with Evan Smith, airing on PBS stations nationally. A New York native, he has a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Hamilton College and a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.

Alan Tarr (Stanford University)

Director of the Center for State Constitutional Studies and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University-Camden. He serves as editor of State Constitutions of the United States, a 50-volume reference series (Greenwood Press) and as co-editor, with Robert Williams, of “Subnational Constitutions” for the International Encyclopedia of Laws (Kluwer). He is co-editor of the three-volume State Constitutions for the Twenty-first Century (State University of New York Press), of Constitutional Origins, Structure, and Change in Federal Countries (McGill-Queen’s), and of Federalism, Subnational Constitutions, and Minority Rights (Praeger). He is the author of Understanding State Constitutions (Princeton University Press) and Judicial Process and Judicial Policymaking (Wadsworth); co-author of State Supreme Courts in State and Nation, (Yale University Press) and of American Constitutional Law, (Wadsworth). He served as editor and contributor to Constitutional Politics in the States (Greenwood) and Federalism and Rights, (Rowman & Littlefield). Three times the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he has lectured on state constitutionalism throughout the United States and on subnational constitutionalism and federalism in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America.

Dennis Thompson (Harvard University)

Dennis F. Thompson, Professor of Public Policy, is also the Alfred North Whitehead Professor of Political Philosophy in the Government Department in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and founding Director of Harvard’s university-wide ethics program, now the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. His books include: Just Elections: Creating a Fair Electoral Process in the United States; Restoring Responsibility: Ethics in Government, Business and Healthcare;Political Ethics and Public Office; and Ethics in Congress: From Individual to Institutional Corruption. He is also the author (jointly with Amy Gutmann) of The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It; Why Deliberative Democracy? and Democracy & Disagreement. Professor Thompson has served as a consultant to the Joint Ethics Committee of the South African Parliament, the American Medical Association, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, and the Department of Health and Human Services. He received his BA in philosophy summa cum laude from the College of William and Mary; took first-class honors in philosophy, politics, and economics at Balliol College, Oxford; and holds a PhD in political science from Harvard.

Jeff Tulis (University of Texas)

Jeffrey Tulis’s interests bridge the fields of political theory and American politics, including more specifically, American political development, constitutional theory, political philosophy and the American presidency. His publications include The Presidency in the Constitutional Order (LSU, 1981; Transaction, 2010), The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, 1987), The Constitutional Presidency (Johns Hopkins 2009), The Limits of Constitutional Democracy (Princeton, 2010) and recent journal articles and chapters on constitutional interpretation, the logic of political change, and the meaning of political success. Four collections of essays on The Rhetorical Presidency with responses by Tulis have been published, most recently a special double issue of Critical Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Politics and Society, (2007), where his book is described as “one of the two or three most important and perceptive works written by a political scientist in the twentieth century.”

Alan Wolfe (Boston College)

Alan Wolfe is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. He is the author and editor of more than 20 books, including, most recently, The Future of Liberalism (Knopf, 2009), Does American Democracy Still Work? (Yale University Press, 2006) Return to Greatness: How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What it Needs to Do to Recover It (Princeton University Press, 2005), The Transformation of American Religion: How We actually Live our Faith (Free Press, 2003), and An Intellectual in Public (University of Michigan Press, 2003). He is the author or editor of more than ten other books including Marginalized in the Middle (1997), One Nation, After All (1998), Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice (2001) and School Choice: The Moral Debate (editor, 2002). Both One Nation, After All and Moral Freedom were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year.

A contributing editor of The New Republic, The Wilson Quarterly, Commonwealth Magazine, and In Character, Professor Wolfe writes often for those publications as well as for Commonweal, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, and other magazines and newspapers. He served as an advisor to President Clinton in preparation for his 1995 State of the Union address and has lectured widely at American and European universities.