Ben Johnson

Professor Ben Johnson is an associate professor of law at Penn State Law where he teaches Federal Courts, Corporate Law, and Law & Finance. His multimethodological research focuses on how judges make decisions, the consequences of judicial decision-making, and the normative implications of judicial processes. His article, The Origins of Supreme Court Question-Selection, recently appeared in the Columbia Law Review and examines the roots of the Supreme Court’s practice of preselecting questions for review. The follow-up piece showing the empirical consequences of the Court’s practice (entitled The Active Vices) is forthcoming at the Alabama Law Review. His research has also appeared in the North Carolina Law Review, the Connecticut Law Review, the University of Illinois Law Review, and Political Research Quarterly. In addition, he has ongoing projects using text analysis and novel machine learning tools to study the Court. In addition to his empirical work, he has a series of projects using formal modeling to study economic inequality and the logic of moral and judicial decision-making.