Paul Gardner

Research Interests

American institutions and separation of powers, public law, judicial politics, legal mobilization, constitutional law (including civil rights and liberties), race and law, and legal institutions

I would be interested in supervising graduate students in the area of law and courts, especially judicial behavior and legal mobilization in the U.S. and Canadian contexts. I may also supervise students working on American institutions, broadly construed.

Biography

I am an Assistant Professor of Political Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. I 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. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Politics at Princeton University.

My research and teaching interests are broadly in American law and politics. My 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. My 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. I argue 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, I examine how the public and governmental actors respond to Supreme Court decisions, as well as public preferences about judicial institutions and legal outcomes.

Teaching 

For detailed information about political studies courses and instructors, please refer to the Undergraduate and Graduate pages. 

Service (2024/2025)

• Colloquium Committee
• Departmental Committee