Biography
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. My research centers on American political institutions, with a particular focus on judicial decision making. I use both formal theoretic & empirical research approaches, and a passion for accurate statistical inference in my substantive work also leads to methodology-focused projects. My current projects focus on the extent to which the law constrains the decisions of US Supreme Court justices, measuring judicial ideology, and using and extending machine learning methods for the study of politics.
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Interests
- American Political Institutions
- Judicial Politics
- Formal Theory
- Quantitative Methodology
Education
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PhD in Political Science, 2022
Washington University in St. Louis
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JD, 2015
Baylor University School of Law
Published Work
(2022).
Ends Against the Middle: Measuring Latent Traits When Opposites Respond the Same Way for Antithetical Reasons.
Political Analysis.
(2021).
Agenda Setting and Attention to Precedent in the US Federal Courts.
Journal of Law and Courts 9(2): 233-260.
(2021).
Explaining legal inconsistency.
Journal of Theoretical Politics 34(1): 107-126.
(2020).
GPIRT: A Gaussian Process Model for Item Response Theory.
Proceedings of the 36th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), PMLR 124:520-529.
Working Papers
Data and Software
(2020).
R package: bggum.
(2018).
R package: RcppDist.
Teaching
(2023).
Judicial Process and Behavior.
(2021).
Constitutional Law.