Timothy Johnson

Narrative

Timothy R. Johnson is Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Political Science. He received his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1998. He is also affiliated Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Institute of Law and Politics at the University of Minnesota law school. Professor Johnson's research and teaching interests include judicial politics, Supreme Court decision-making, Supreme Court oral arguments, executive/judiciary relations, and the evolution of the norm of respecting precedent. He has published articles in the American Political Science Review, American Politics Research, Congress and the Presidency, the University of Illinois Law Review, the Journal of Politics, Law and Society Review, Loyola University Law Review, the University of Minnesota Law Review, Political Analysis, Political Research Quarterly, and the Washington University Journal of Law and Policy. He is also the co-editor of A Good Quarrel (University of Michigan Press, 2009, with Jerry Goldman), the author of Oral Arguments and Decision Making on the U.S. Supreme Court (SUNY Press, 2004) and the co-author of Religious Institutions and Minor Parties in the United States (Praeger Press 1999, with Chris Gilbert, David A.M. Peterson, and Paul Djupe). Professor Johnson's work has also been supported by the National Science Foundation. His first grant (IIS-0324992), ITR SCOTUS: A Resource for Collaborative Research in Speech Technology, Linguistics, Decision Processes, and the Law (with Jerry Goldman, Brian McWhinney, and Mark Liberman), is an effort to digitize all U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments from 1955-present, with an emphasis on using the audio to analyze oral arguments affect the Court's decisions. The second grant (SES-0550276), Collaborative Research: The Establishment of Stare Decisis in the American Legal System (with James F. Spriggs II and Paul J. Wahlbeck) focuses on the examination of the how the norm of respecting precedent affects the decisions of judges within the American legal system.