Methodological Pluralism, Liberty, and the Rule of Law

Session Submission Type: In-Person Roundtable

Session Description

Methodological Pluralism. This panel seeks to bring together legal scholars and political scientists to reflect in some way on the following issues from a variety of perspectives: Should Congress and the judiciary take into account one another’s practices and norms when carrying out their respective duties? If so, how? And what do they actually do? For example, when judges interpret statutes, what role if any should and does the “reality” of how the legislature operated when crafting the piece of legislation play? Conversely, when the legislature is engaged in the drafting of laws, what role if any should and do judicial norms/doctrines (e.g. canons of construction) play?

Panelists:

1, Ben Johnson
Ben Johnson is an assistant professor of law at Penn State Law and holds affiliate faculty positions with the College of Information Sciences and Technology and the Department of Political Science in the College of the Liberal Arts. He uses formal and quantitative tools to study judicial decision-making. Much of his work focuses on the agenda-setting process at the Supreme Court, certiorari. He holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton, a J.D. from the Yale Law school, a M.A. in Economics from Boston University, and a B.A. from Baylor University.

2, Laura E. Jenkins
Currently a Ph.D. Candidate (Political Science, Major Field: Political Theory, Minor Field: Law and Courts) and University Fellow at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Her dissertation "Paradise Lost: The Effect of Judicial Review on Congressional Debate" examines constitutional deliberation in Congress and assesses how Congress changed how it debated the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012). Her dissertation argues that the Supreme Court should not exercise judicial review in cases where the other branches of government are already engaging in a robust constitutional dialogue over the constitutional issues involved. Instead, the Supreme Court should let the democratic processes play out regardless of the outcome. She also has an M.A in Political Science from Syracuse.


3. Michael A. Bailey
Michael A. Bailey is the Colonel William J. Walsh Professor of American Government in the Department of Government and McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. His research focuses on applying statistical techniques to answering questions at the intersection political science, policy, law and and economics. In his work on the Supreme Court, Bailey has studied the role of ideology and legal values on Supreme Court decision making, producing, among other publications, The Constrained Court: Law, Politics and the Decisions Justices Make with Forrest Maltzman. In his work on public opinion polling, Bailey focuses on re-thinking the way we design surveys in order to provide us more information about how serious non-response bias may be. In his work on welfare policy, Bailey presented strong evidence that while poor single mothers decisions on where to live are influenced by state welfare policies, these decisions are even more strongly influenced by family ties. Bailey is the author of two statistics books. The goal of these books is to get to interesting and useful statistical material as quickly as possible. To be useful, the books focus on endogeneity (“correlation is not causation”) and to be interesting, the books quickly start using real data sets to answer important questions. The books are quite similar. Real Stats focuses on political and policy examples. Real Econometrics focuses on economic and policy examples. As a former Monbusho Scholar at the Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (then at Saitama University) in Japan, Bailey is conversational in Japanese and interested in Japanese politics.

4. J. Mitch Pickerill
J. Mitchell Pickerill is director of Undergraduate Studies and a professor in the Department of Political Science at Northern Illinois University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, his J.D. from Indiana University (Bloomington) and his B.A. from Purdue University. Prior to coming to NIU, he was assistant and associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Washington State University. His teaching and research interests include American politics, law and courts, constitutional law and theory and federalism. Pickerill's current research focuses on the relationship between the Supreme Court and the other branches of government. He is the author of Congress and Constitutional Deliberation: The Impact of Judicial Review in a Separated System (Duke U. Press 2004) as well as various book chapters and articles in journals such as Perspectives on Politics, Publius, Polity, Georgetown Law Journal, Santa Clara Law Review and Law & Policy.

Sub Unit

• Related Groups / Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies

Chairs

• Anthony Deardurff The Federalist Society for Law & Public Policy Studies

• Nicholas W Garfinkel The Federalist Society

Presenters

• Ben Johnson Penn State Law

• Laura Erika Jenkins Syracuse University

• Mitch Pickerill Northern Illinois University

• Michael A. Bailey Georgetown University