CSDD Research Fellows Present: "Parliamentary Constraints on the Constitutional Decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada" - Paul J. Gardner

The Centre for the Study of Democracy and Diversity Research Fellows Present:

Paul J. Gardner

Assistant Professor, Department of Political Studies

"Parliamentary Constraints on the Constitutional Decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada" 

Monday, January 22, 2024 | 3:00-4:30 PM

Mackintosh-Corry Hall, Room E202

68 University Avenue, Kingston

Biography:

Paul J. Gardner is an Assistant Professor of Political Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He was formerly a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Law in the Contemporary Workplace at the Queen's University Faculty of Law and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Politics at Princeton University.

Dr. Gardner's research and teaching interests are broadly in American law and politics. His work sits at the intersection of a number of sub-disciplines of political science, including American institutions, judicial politics, American political development, law and society, and political behavior. His primary research agenda aims to understand the effectiveness of “private enforcement statutes,” federal laws in which the primary mechanism of enforcement is private litigation, rather than direct bureaucratic action. He argues that a number of actors—presidents, bureaucratic agencies, judges, and interest groups—all have a hand in determining whether individuals will make use of private rights of action by filing lawsuits.

In other research, Dr. Gardner examines how the public and governmental actors respond to Supreme Court decisions, as well as public preferences about judicial institutions and legal outcomes.