Research

Publications

"Regulatory Productivity in Federal Administration: An Empirical Analysis of the Deep State" (with Nicholas G. Napolio), Rutgers University Law Review (forthcoming), available on SSRN.​

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"Serving Two Masters? Public Ethics and the Regulation of Financial Conflicts of Interest in the Administrative State," Albany Law Review (forthcoming), available on SSRN.

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"The Politicized Enforcement of Laws Criminalizing Executive Branch Conflicts of Interest," Presidential Studies Quarterly 52(1): 224-245 (2022).

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"The Mixed Effects of Candidate Visits on Campaign Donations in the 2020 Presidential Election" (with Boris Heersink and Nicholas G. Napolio), American Politics Research (forthcoming).

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"The Walking Dead: How the Criminal Regulation of Sodomy Survived Lawrence v. Texas," Missouri Law Review 86(3): 857-902 (2021).

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"Mobilization and Countermobilization: The Effect of Candidate Visits on Campaign Donations in the 2016 Presidential Election" (with Boris Heersink and Brenton Peterson), Journal of Politics 83(4): 1878-1883 (2021).

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"The Personal Finances of United States Supreme Court Justices and Decision-Making in Economic Litigation" (with Thora Giallouri and Elli Menounou), Journal of Legal Studies 50(2): 379-405 (2021).

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"Institutional Foundations of the American Revolution: Legislative Politics in Colonial North America" (with Nicholas G. Napolio), Journal of Historical Political Economy 1(2): 235-257 (2021).

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"The Private Interests of Public Officials: Financial Regulation in the U.S. Congress" (with Christian R. Grose), Legislative Studies Quarterly 46(1): 49-84 (2020).

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"Economic Interests Cause Elected Officials to Liberalize Their Racial Attitudes" (with Christian R. Grose), Political Research Quarterly 73(3): 511-525 (2020).

- Recognized as the Best Article Published in PRQ during 2020.

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"No Vacancy or Open for Business? Making Accommodations for Digital Platform Short-Term Rentals in Major American Municipalities" (with Braedon Sims), University of Hawai'i Law Review 43(1): 123-165 (2020), available on SSRN.

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"The Mask of Neutrality: Judicial Partisan Calculation and Legislative Redistricting," Law & Policy 41(3): 336-359 (2019).

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"Packing the Courts: Ideological Proximity and Expansions to the Federal Judiciary from 1937 to 2012" (with Elli Menounou, Adam Feldman, and Thora Giallouri), Journal of Law & Courts 7(1): 81-106 (2019).

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"Their Boot in Our Face No Longer? Administrative Sectionalism and Resistance to Federal Authority in the U.S. South" (with Nicholas G. Napolio), State Politics & Policy Quarterly 19(1): 101-122 (2019).

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"All Their Eggs in One Basket? Ideological Congruence in Congress and the Bicameral Origins of Concentrated Delegation to the Bureaucracy", Laws 7(2): 1-15 (2018).

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"Letting Down the Ladder or Shutting the Door: Female Prime Ministers, Party Leaders, and Cabinet Members" (with Diana Z. O'Brien, Matthew Mendez, and Jihyun Shin), Politics & Gender 11(4): 689-717 (2015).

Public scholarship

Working papers

Abstract: Since the civil rights movement accomplished many of its paramount successes via litigation, progressive advocacy communities have tended to regard courts as essential bulwarks against the legal enshrinement of oppression targeting politically vulnerable minorities. Advocates of LGBTQ equality are no different, identifying the judiciary as critical to eradicating discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, witnessed notably in the movement's having championed a series of Supreme Court decisions expanding gay rights from the mid-1990s to the present. Standing alone, however, holdings by the Supreme Court revising the operative scope of civil rights for sexual minorities represent only a change in the formulation of public policy rather than effecting immediate changes in policy implementation. Judicially directed reformulations of public policy thus require cooperation by those responsible for policy implementation, and compliance rates with judicial directives may vary, especially on matters of public policy over which states retain considerable sovereignty. In this article, I analyze state responses to two prominent Supreme Court decisions on public policies that implicate the constitutional rights of sexual minorities: Lawrence v. Texas, decriminalizing private, consensual, nonprocreative intercourse, and Obergefell v. Hodges, holding state same-sex marriage bans unconstitutional. While adherence to Obergefell was swift and nearly universal, compliance outcomes for Lawrence have been uneven, as some states continue to enforce statutes that are materially equivalent to the "homosexual conduct" law at issue in Lawrence. I argue that compliance with Lawrence has lagged compared to Obergefell for three reasons: (1) linguistic imprecision in the Lawrence decision; (2) divergent views of the right(s) at issue in each case, including variation in the constituencies affected by each instance of litigation; and (3) the absence of a federal executive regime credibly committed to the case's outcome.