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Biographies of Participants



 

 


 

Mitchell N. Berman holds the Richard Dale Endowed Chair in Law at the University of Texas School of Law. He teaches and writes in two primary fields: the philosophy of criminal law and constitutional theory. His many articles have appeared in the leading peer-reviewed journals Ethics, Legal Theory, Law & Philosophy, and Constitutional Commentary, as well as in such student-edited publications as the University of Chicago Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the NYU Law Review, the Texas Law Review, the Duke Law Journal, and the Georgetown Law Journal.

Before joining the Texas faculty in 1998, Berman clerked for the Hon. J. Dickson Phillips, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and practiced law with Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C. He has been Visiting Professor at the law schools of the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago.

He is the 2008 recipient of the Texas Exes Teaching Excellence Award and Co-Director of the Law School's Law and Philosophy Program. Berman earned his AB at Harvard and his MA and JD at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

Frank B. Cross is Herbert D. Kelleher Centennial Professor of Business Law at the University of Texas Law School and holds a joint appointment at the UT Business School. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he practiced law for several years before joining the Business School faculty in 1984. He has received six awards for teaching excellence during his tenure at UT. His scholarship traverses several fields, including descriptive and normative studies of judicial decision-making, the economics of law and litigation, and traditional policy and doctrinal issues in administrative and environmental law. He has published more than twenty articles, including "What's Not to Like (About Being a Lawyer)?" (Yale Law Journal) (with C. Silver), "Institutions and Enforcement of the Bill of Rights" (Cornell Law Review), "Realism About Federalism" (New York University Law Review), "A Modest Proposal for Improving American Justice" (Columbia Law Review) (with E. Tiller), "Shattering the Fragile Case for Judicial Review of Administrative Rulemaking" (Virginia Law Review), and "Judicial Partisanship and Obedience to Legal Doctrine" (Yale Law Journal) (with E. Tiller). In the Law School, he teaches courses and seminars on legislation, agency, judicial decision-making, and aspects of administrative and environmental law. (Conference Paper: Stability Predictability and the Rule of Law: Stare Decisis as Reciprocity Norm )

Zachary Elkins is Assistant Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Elkins’ research focuses on issues of democracy, institutional reform, research methods, and national identity, with an emphasis on cases in Latin America. He is currently completing a book manuscript, Designed by Diffusion: Constitutional Reform in Developing Democracies, which examines the design and diffusion of democratic institutions, and recently completed The Endurance of National Constitutions, which explores the factors that lead to the survival of national constitutions. With Tom Ginsburg (University of Chicago), Professor Elkins co-directs both the Comparative Constitutions Project, a NSF-funded initiative to understand the causes and consequences of constitutional choices, and the website constitutionmaking.org, which provides resources and analysis for constitutional drafters in new democracies. Elkins earned his B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. (Conference Paper:On the Interpretability of Law: Lessons from the Decoding of National Constitutions )

John Ferejohn is the Charles Seligson Professor of Law at New York University and Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Stanford University. His primary areas of scholarly interest are political theory and the study of political institutions and behavior. His current research focuses on Congress, law and legislation, constitutional adjudication in the United States and Europe, separation of powers, political campaigns and elections, and the philosophy of social science.

Formerly a professor of political science at the California Institute of Technology, Ferejohn was at Hoover and Stanford University from 1983 to 2009 and taught courses in American government, political philosophy, and positive political theory. At NYU he teaches democratic theory, comparative constitutional law, and applications of positive political theory to law.

He has held fellowships with the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois, and the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

Rui J.P. de Figueiredo, Jr., is an Associate Professor at the Haas School of Business and Department of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. Substantively, his research focuses on the design and effects of institutional arrangements, with a special emphasis on the American bureaucracy. Methodologically, his work focuses on game theoretic and econometric analyses of political and economic institutions and organizations. He has written extensively in political science, law and economics, and business journals. Recently, his articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, and Journal of Public Economics, among others. He is also a co-author of a book, The Outsider: Prejudice and Politics in Modern Italy. At the Haas School, he is a member of the school's Executive Committee and chair of the Business and Public Policy group. Previously, Rui was a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and was a strategy consultant for the Boston Consulting Group. Rui earned an A,B., summa cum laude, in History from Harvard College and two M.A.'s (economics and political science) and a Ph.D. (political science) from Stanford University.

Tom Ginsburg is a Professor at the University of Chicago School of Law who focuses on comparative and international law from an interdisciplinary perspective. He holds BA, JD, and PhD degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. One of his books, Judicial Review in New Democracies (Cambridge University Press 2003) won the C. Herman Pritchett Award from the American Political Science Association for best book on law and courts. He has served as a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, Kyushu University, Seoul National University, the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Trento. He currently co-directs the Comparative Constitutions Project, an effort funded by the National Science Foundation to gather and analyze the constitutions of all independent nation-states since 1789. Before entering law teaching, he served as a legal adviser at the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, The Hague, Netherlands, and consulted with numerous international development agencies and foreign governments on legal and constitutional reform. (Conference Paper: On the Interpretability of Law: Lessons from the Decoding of National Constitutions )

Stephan Haggard is Lawrence and Sallye Krause Distinguished Professor at the University of California at San Diego Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies.

Among his books are The Developing Nations and the Politics of Global Integration, The Political Economy of the Asian Financial Crisis, and Development, Democracy and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia and Eastern Europe(with Robert Kaufman). Several of his books have been translated into Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. He earned his Ph.D., M.A., and B.A. in political science at UC Berkeley. (Conference Paper: The Rule of Law and Economic Growth: Where Are We? )

Paul Horwitz is Associate Professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, where he teaches law and religion, constitutional law, and legal profession. He received his B.A. in English Literature from McGill University in Montreal, M.S., with honors, in Journalism from Columbia University, LL.B. from the University of Toronto, where he was co-editor-in-chief of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law Review, and LL.M. from Columbia Law School. Professor Horwitz clerked for the Honorable Ed Carnes of the United Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Before joining the University of Alabama, Professor Horwitz was an associate professor at the Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, the University of San Diego School of Law, and Notre Dame Law School. In addition to having written and spoken widely on issues of constitutional law, Professor Horwitz is a member of the popular legal blog Prawfsblawg.

Professor Horwitz's books include: First Amendment Institutions (under contract with Harvard University Press) and Constitutional Agnosticism (under contract with Oxford University Press). (Conference Paper: Democracy as the Rule of Law)

Jack Knight is Professor of Political Science and Law at Duke University. His primary areas of interest lie at the intersection of law and politics. His major research focuses on issues in democratic theory, courts and judicial decision-making and the political economy of institutions. His publications include Institutions and Social Conflict, Explaining Social Institutions (with Itai Sened), The Choices Justices Make (with Lee Epstein), and Designing Democratic Government: Making Institutions Work (with Margaret Levi, James Johnson and Susan Stokes), as well as articles in numerous law reviews, journals and edited volumes.

Stefanie A. Lindquist is the Thomas W. Gregory Professor of Law at the University of Texas Law School, where she has taught since 2008. Prior to her arrival in Texas, she taught political science and law at Vanderbilt University and at the University of Georgia. She holds the J.D. from Temple University School of Law and the PhD in Political Science from the University of South Carolina. Following law school, she clerked for the Honorable Anthony J. Scirica at the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, and practiced law at Latham and Watkins in Washington, D.C. She also worked as a Research Associate at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington D.C. assisting committees of the Federal Judicial Conference address questions of judicial administration.

Lindquist's research focuses on judicial behavior in the federal and state appellate courts. In Judging on a Collegial Court: Influences on Federal Appellate Decision Making. Lindquist and co-authors Wendy Martinek and Virginia Hettinger explored dissensus on the federal courts of appeals by evaluating factors that influenced circuit court judges' decisions to dissent, concur, and reverse the lower court. In Measuring Judicial Activism, Lindquist and co-author Frank Cross identified objective, empirical measures of judicial activism on the United States Supreme Court. Other research has been published in numerous political science and law journals.

Lindquist teaches courses in Legislation, Federal Courts, and Administrative Law. She also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. (Conference Paper: Stability Predictability and the Rule of Law: Stare Decisis as Reciprocity Norm )

Mathew D. McCubbins is Provost Professor at the University of Southern California with joint appointments at the Gould School of Law and the Marshall School of Business. Professor McCubbins is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has also taught at the University of Texas, Stanford University, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of San Diego Law School.

He is the co-author of six books, The Logic of Delegation, winner of the APSA’s 1992 Gladys M. Kammerer Award; Legislative Leviathan , winner of the APSA’s Legislative Studies Section’s 1994 Richard F. Fenno Jr. Prize; The Democratic Dilemma: Can Citizens Learn What They Need to Know?; Stealing the Initiative; Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the US House of Representatives, winner of the APSA’s Leon Epstein Award; and Legislative Leviathan, Second Edition. He is also editor or coeditor of eight additional books and has authored or coauthored more than 60 scientific articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries, in political science, economics and biology, with one winning the Congressional Quarterly Prize for best article on legislative politics and another winning the SPPQ Award for best article on state politics. Professor McCubbins holds a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. (Conference Paper: The Rule of Law Unplugged)

Roger Noll is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Stanford University. He previously taught at California Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include public policies toward business, rational actor models of public policy making, the positive theory of the courts, economics and politics of utility regulation, economics of sports, and telecommunications reform in developing countries. His book, Economic Aspects of Television Regulation (co-authored with Merton J. Peck and John J. McGowan) was the winner of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters Annual Book Award. He also co-authored The Political Economy of Deregulation and The Technology Pork Barrel, in addition to editing or co-editing several more books. He received the Rhodes Prize for Undergraduate Teaching at Stanford and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He earned an A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Daniel B. Rodriguezserves as the Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair in Law. He came to the University of Texas School of Law in 2007 from the University of San Diego School of Law, where he was the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law. He served as Dean of that law school from 1998 until 2005 and, before that, was a tenured professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall School of Law).

In addition to his appointment at UT, Professor Rodriguez is a fellow in law & public policy at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. Professor Rodriguez earned his JD from Harvard and his BA from California State University-Long Beach. (Conference Paper: The Rule of Law Unplugged)

Lawrence Sager is one of the nation's preeminent constitutional theorists and scholars. His appointment as Dean is widely regarded as an event of great promise for the University of Texas School of Law, where he holds the John Jeffers Research Chair in Law and the Alice Jane Drysdale Sheffield Regents Chair. Dean Sager came to Texas from New York University School of Law, where he was the Robert B. McKay Professor and Co-Founder of the Program in Law, Philosophy & Social Theory. He has also taught at Harvard, Princeton, Boston University, UCLA, and the University of Michigan. He earned an LLB from Columbia University and a BA from Pomona College. Dean Sager is the author or co-author of dozens of articles, many now classics in the canon of legal scholarship. Sager is the author of two books: Justice in Plainclothes: a Theory of American Constitutional Practice (Yale Univ. Press), and Religious Freedom and the Constitution (co-authored with Christopher Eisgruber) (Harvard Univ. Press).

Jeffrey Staton is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Emory University. He earned his Ph.D. at Washington University. His interests include comparative judicial politics, institutional theory, politics of law, courts in the United States and other countries (Mexico in particular), and areas such as human rights protection, citizenship and nationality, and the politics of dictatorship. (Conference Paper: Judicial Independence and the Democratic Order )

Lydia Brashear Tiede is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Houston. She has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan, a J.D. from American University, and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, San Diego. She studies American and comparative judicial politics. Broadly speaking, she studies the effect of legal reform, in the form of legislation and higher court mandates on lower court decision-making. To this end, she has analyzed the effect of the U.S. federal sentencing guidelines and recent reforms to these guidelines on district court discretion. She also has done empirical and field research on Chile’s legal reform converting its criminal law system from inquisitorial to adversarial. Other areas of research include assessing the effect of criminal law reforms in the states, the United Kingdom, and Costa Rica and deciphering the meaning of judicial independence and the rule of law in emerging and developed democracies. (Conference Paper: The Rule of Law and Economic Growth: Where Are We? )

Frank Upham is the Wilf Family Professor of Property Law at New York University School of Law. In addition to property law, Prof. Upham offers courses on law and development with an emphasis on Asia. He currently serves as co-director of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute.

Prof. Upham has spent considerable time at various institutions in Asia, including as a Japan Foundation Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Doshisha University, as a Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at Sophia University, and as a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His scholarship has focused on Japan, and he published a Japanese language essay on the “stealth activism” of the Japanese judiciary. His book Law and Social Change in Postwar Japan received the Thomas J. Wilson Prize from Harvard University Press. More recently he has begun researching and writing about Chinese law and society and development generally. His Yale Law Journal essay, “Who Will Find the Defendant if He Stays with his Sheep? Justice in Rural China,” helped introduce contemporary Chinese sociolegal scholarship to an English-speaking audience for the first time.

Prof. Upham graduated from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and Harvard Law School. From 1967 to 1970, Prof. Upham taught in the Department of Western Languages at Tunghai University in Taichung, Taiwan, and was a journalist in Southeast Asia. After law school he worked as a litigator in the Office of the Attorney General in Massachusetts. Before moving to NYU in 1994, he taught at Ohio State, Harvard, and Boston College law schools.

Georg Vanberg is Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, and Co-Director of the Undergraduate Honors Program in the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His interests focus on comparative constitutional and judicial politics as well as on coalition theory. He teaches courses on judicial and constitutional politics, formal modeling, and West European politics. His work has appeared in such journals as the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Politics. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester.