Jeffery A. Jenkins
USC Gould School of Law

Jeffery A. Jenkins holds appointments as professor of public policy, political science, and law at the USC Gould School of Law and Provost Professor of Political Science, Public Policy, and Law, Judith & John Bedrosian Chair of Governance and the Public Enterprise, Director of the Bedrosian Center, and Director of the Political Institutions and Political Economy (PIPE) Collaborative at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. He previously held tenure-stream positions at the University of Virginia, Northwestern University, and Michigan State University.

His research interests include American political institutions and development (with a special emphasis on Congress and political parties), lawmaking, separation-of-powers, and political economy. Much of his work takes a positive political theory (or rational choice) approach, and examines how political actors pursue their interests while being constrained by formal and informal institutional arrangements. His current work involves papers on the ideological content of federal lawmaking in the post-war era and book projects on how civil rights policy has been dealt with in Congress over time and how the Republican Party evolved in the South after the Civil War.

Jenkins holds a PhD in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MS in mathematical methods for the social sciences from Northwestern University. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and Michigan State University.

He currently serves as the editor-in-chief of The Journal of Politics.

FACULTY IN THE NEWS

Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance
September 25, 2023
Re: Jonathan Barnett

Jonathan Barnett wrote an op-ed piece, based on his forthcoming paper to be published in the University of Chicago Business Law Review, about antitrust regulations and the effects it has on merger review processes. "This inquiry raises serious concerns that legislators and regulators have embarked on a course of action that has an insufficient factual foundation in the digital markets on which competition policymakers have focused," Barnett wrote.

RECENT SCHOLARSHIP

Mugambi Jouet
August, 2023

“Guns, Mass Incarceration, and Bipartisan Reform: Beyond Vicious Circle and Social Polarization,” 55 Arizona State Law Journal 239 (2023).

Jonathan Barnett
August, 2023

"Killer Acquisitions Reexamined: Economic Hyperbole in the Age of Populist Antitrust," University of Chicago Business Law Review.

Robin Craig
August, 2023

Robin Craig's article, "The Regulatory Shifting Baseline Syndrome: Vaccines, Generational Amnesia, and the Shifting Perception of Risk in Public Law Regimes," 21 Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics 1-60 (July 2022), was featured in The Regulatory Review on August 31, 2023.