Welcome to my academic website! I am a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I study American politics with a focus on judicial politics and quantitative methodology. I also teach courses at UWM on Law & Society and Constitutional Law. I am a member of the Experimental Politics Lab led by Professor Kraft.
My dissertation focuses on mapping and understanding the U.S. Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” — the cases the Court hands down that are not orally argued and are not accompanied by a majority opinion. Drawing on an original database of the emergency docket, and a pre-registered survey experiment, my dissertation looks at the Supreme Court’s “third shift” and its impact on policy, precedent, and public opinion. I hope to clarify the picture we have of Supreme Court decision making by including this data with the existing Supreme Court Database and provide evidence to evaluate the impression that the Court has turned more frequently to make even more consequential decisions “in the shadows.”
In addition to my dissertation, my research interests broadly focus on U.S. Supreme Court decision making, the judicial process, survey experiments, and text analysis. I have been analyzing oral argument in the United States Supreme Court using text as data to uncover potential systematic differences across justices. Most recently I have been running surveys to investigate public opinion of the Supreme Court in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. I have created two novel datasets containing: 1) U.S. Supreme Court emergency docket decisions from OT 2000 through OT 2021 and 2) Oral Argument Transcript dataset from OT 2004-2008.
Prior to my doctoral studies, I received a Masters Degree in Political Science from the School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs at the University of Central Florida. In 2017, I graduated cum laude with honors with a B.A. in Political Science (Middle Eastern Studies Minor) from the University of Central Florida. I also graduated cum laude with a B.A. in History from the College of Arts & Humanities at the University of Central Florida in 2017.