Congratulations, Howard Gillman

Mark Graber

Professor Howard Gillman of the University of Southern California has just been named the Dean of the USC College and been awarded the Anna H. Bing Dean's Chair. In addition to being a longtime friend of numerous Balkinization contributors (does one need any more qualifications), Professor Gillman is a pioneer of both "historical institutionalist" and "regime politics" scholarship in political science. His first book, THE CONSTITUTION BESIEGED, is largely responsible to the Lochner revival in history, law, and political science. That work demonstrates that the justices who defended what became known as the freedom of contract were, in fact, attempting to be faithful to an enduring animus to class legislation in American political and constitutional thought. His second book, THE VOTES THAT COUNTED, is generally considered the best book on Bush v. Gore. Gillman in that work both fairly details the politics responsible for the case and explores in great detail the extent to which all justices involved might be said to be basing decisions on law or politics. More recently, Gillman has played a central role developing what is increasingly becoming known (against my weak objections) as the "regime politics" school of political science. A central tenet of this school is that judicial review is in large part political constructed (this should sound very familiar to persons reading Professor Balkin's recent posts: "partisan entrenchment" is a proud member of the regime politics tradition). Those who are interested in a more theoretical statement of what is involved in this view of courts are well advised to read Gillman's 2002 American Political Science Review essay (other canonical works are by Keith Whittington, Paul Frymer, Kevin McMahon, Tom Keck, Tom Ginsburg, George Lovell and Ran Hirschl).

In addition to all of this, Howard has the unfortunate reputation of being one of the nicest persons in the business, which no doubt accounts for his new administrative responsibilities. Although condolences may be more in order for anyone becoming a dean, virtually everything Howard has done in his career has merited congratulations, so I suspect this latest move will be no exception.
Posted 11:26 AM by Mark Graber [link]