University of Utah | Dept. of Political Science

I’m an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. I specialize in public law, courts, and American political development. My work centers on how American judicial institutions are created and evolve over time, and how political actors use these institutions to influence constitutional change, federalism, and state building.

My book, The US Supreme Court and the Centralization of Federal Authority, explores these themes, using an original database of several hundred landmark decisions compiled from constitutional law casebooks and treatises published between 1822 and 2010. The result is a portrait of how the high court, regardless of constitutional issue and ideology, persistently expanded the reach and scope of the federal government.

I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Cornell University in 2014 after obtaining a B.A. in political science and history, with honors, from Boston College.