Current Projects:
Inter-Court Relations in the American Legal System—Using New Technologies to Examine Communication of Precedent.  With support from the National Science Foundation (Law & Social Sciences, SES-0416455 and SES-0519157), we are engaged in a project to study and map the flow of precedent across the American court system during the full course of the 20th century on the issue of regulatory takings.  Visit the Project website: CITE-IT

Digital Docket: Applying Computational Linguistics to the Study of Law and Courts.  With Support from the National Science Foundation, under award BSC-0624067, from September, 2006 to August, 2009

Editor, Law and Politics Book Review. Reviews are published frequently, and readers are notified by e-mail as new ones are available.  The Section has a membership of almost 900 and presently sends the Review to over 1,300 readers in 39 countries.  The electronic medium enables us to review almost every book about the legal process and politics, to do longer reviews than are usually published, and to make the reviews available within six months of our receipt of the book.
 

Publications: 

• Recounting the Courts? Toward a Text-Centered Computational Approach to Understanding the Dynamics of the Judicial System. (with Michael Evans, Jimmy Lin, and Cynthia Cates). Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. (Forthcoming 2007).
• Law & the Web of Society (with Cynthia L. Cates).  2001, Georgetown University Press.
• Judicial Entrepreneurship: The Role of the Judge in the Marketplace of Ideas.  (with Cynthia L. Cates).  1997. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
• The Appeal of Civil Law:  A Political Economic Analysis of Litigation.  1990, University of Illinois Press.
   

Fields of Study:

• Law, Courts & Politics
• American Politics
• Information Technology
• Political Inquiry and Methodology
• Mathematical modeling 

Awards:

• UMD Excellence in Mentorship, 2003
• UMD Certificate for Teaching Excellence, 2000, 1998
• BSOS Excellence in Teaching Award, 1996, 1990
• 1995-1996 CTE-Lilly Teaching Fellow

Courses:

• American Political Thought
• Courts & Policy Development
• Judicial Process & Decision-Making (graduate)
• Law OnLine
• Judicial Process (undergraduate)
• First Amendment Politics
• IT & Society, Graduate
• IT & Society, Undergraduate
• Introduction to American Government & Politics