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Dr. Laura Langer

Title: Associate Professor
Office: Social Sciences Room 327
Phone: 520-621-8983
Office Hours: Tuesday 8:00-9:00 and Thursday 2:00-4:00 (Spring 2009)
Email: llanger@email.arizona.edu
Personal website: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~llanger
Bio or Research Areas:
Laura Langer received her Ph.D. from Florida State University in December 1998. Before joining the faculty at the University of Arizona in 1999, she taught at Washington State University for one year.

She teaches courses on judicial process and behavior, civil liberties, law and public policy, and American state institutions.

Professor Langer's research interests are in the areas of judicial politics and behavior, American state political institutions, public policy, and methodology. She has refereed journal articles appearing in Journal of Politics, American Journal of Political Science, Public Choice, Social Science Quarterly, American Politics Research, and State Politics and Policy Quarterly. Her book, Judicial Review in State Supreme Courts: A Comparative Study, is published with the State University of New York University Press. In her book, she examines the conditions under which justices on American state courts of last resort vote strategically or sincerely when they invoke the power of judicial review. She finds that justices alter their voting behavior depending on the ideological distance from the other branches of government, institutional rules, political settings, and the saliency of the policy. Most recently, she received a National Science Foundation Career Development Grant to evaluate the relationships among justices on state courts of last resort, legislators, governors, interest groups, and the public, using original data from court cases and personal elite interviews. To date, she has conducted over 400 personal interviews from ten different American states and she has data from mail surveys from political actors in each branch of state government from all 50 states. She also is working on projects that examine opinion assignments on American state courts of last resort, the impact of courts on policy adoption, as well as the impact of federalism on income inequality in the American states.