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John Barnes
Associate Professor of Political Science
Contact Information
Office: VKC 310
Phone: (213)740-1689
E-mail:
barnesj@usc.edu
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Biographical Sketch
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After receiving his law degree from the University of Chicago Law School, Jeb practiced as a commercial litigator in Boston and San Francisco. In 1994, he left the practice of law to pursue a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, he won the prestigious Peter Odegard Memorial Award for the most promising scholar, an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award for teaching excellence, and numerous fellowships, including the Charles Atwood Kofoid Fellowship, the Henry Braden Fellowship, and a Phi Beta Kappa Research Fellowship.
Jeb has published peer-reviewed articles in a variety of journals, including the Political Research Quarterly, Law & Society Review, Annual Review of Political Science, and Justice Systems Journal, and two books: Overruled? Legislative Overrides, Pluralism, and Contemporary Court-Congress Relations (Stanford 2004) and a co-edited volume, Making Policy, Making Law: An Interbranch Perspective (Georgetown 2004). In 2003, he was one of five political scientists nationally to receive a two-year Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Research Fellowship. During his fellowship, he pursued a range of new research projects, including an analysis of the role of litigation in the politics of asbestos injury compensation and a study of how organizations translate general legal commands into specific practices. His third book, Trying to Settle the Dust: Asbestos, Court-Based Tort Reform and the Politics of Inefficiency, is currently under contract with Georgetown Press.
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Education
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 M.A. Political Science, University of California, Berkeley
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J.D. Law, University of Chicago Law School, 1/1989
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Ph.D. Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, 2001
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Description of Research
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Summary Statement of Research Interests
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Professor Barnes' specialties are public law and American politics, with a particular emphasis on inter-branch relations. His dissertation "Overruled? Congressional Overrides, Judicial Behavior and Court Congress Relations, 1974 to present," was awarded special recognition by the Law and Society Association.
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Research Specialties
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Public Law,American Politics
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Detailed Statement of Research Interests
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Courts reach into nearly every corner of contemporary American society, including the workplace, voting booths, schools, playgrounds, even the air we breathe. Given their scope of activity, understanding how courts shape American politics and policy-making represents a core challenge of political science, especially the fields of public law, public administration, and American politics.
It is also enormously complex. Studying courts requires researchers to penetrate arcane legal rules and dense professional jargon and master subjects ranging from high-profile conflicts over constitutional rights to less visible—but often no less important—regulatory disputes.
Confronted with this complexity, most judicial scholars have tended to specialize, compartmentalizing the study of courts from other segments of government and concentrating on judicial decision-making within specific courts, especially the U.S. Supreme Court. This strategy has its benefits. Specialization has yielded a mature research agenda on judicial behavior that remains productive. But it has a price. American politics and policy-making are inherently interactive processes. Analyzing courts in isolation may produce an incomplete and even misleading view of how law shapes—and is shaped by—politics.
Instead of narrowly examining judicial decision-making, my research views law and courts from an “interbranch perspective,” which holds that American politics and policy-making emanate from ongoing interactions among the branches and levels of government. This perspective, I argue, flows from essential features of American government. Most obviously, the U.S. Constitution disperses power among overlapping and diversely representative policy-making forums. The resulting institutional redundancy produces an array of dynamics that include direct confrontations, strategic alliances, and political games of credit claiming and blame shifting. In this system of “separated institutions sharing power," the central task is not explaining the behavior of any single actor; it is understanding the patterns of shifting relationships among actors across policy areas and over time.
Applying an interbranch perspective is labor intensive, requiring the collection of new data and formulation of new concepts, but its rewards are commensurate. It produces a fuller appreciation of how law and politics interact, which not only enriches court-centric models of judicial behavior but also encourages the re-conceptualization of legal processes in political terms. So, from an interbranch perspective, the filing of lawsuits becomes a distinct mode of agenda setting; contingency fees create a class of political entrepreneurs; and class actions offer a means for overcoming collective action problems. Such re-conceptualization opens avenues of inquiry for court scholars and those interested in American politics and policy making. It also places the analysis of law, courts, and litigation at the heart of the study of American politics and public administration—where they belong.
I have examined the implications of this perspective in twelve publications (two university press books (one single authored book, one co-edited volume); four peer-reviewed articles (three single authored, one as lead co-author); and six book chapters and other articles (four single authored, two as lead co-author)). I currently have five works-in-progress (one book-length project (under advanced contract with Georgetown); two articles being prepared for submission to peer-reviewed journals, and one invited submission to a peer-reviewed journal); and a chapter in a forthcoming edited volume from Brookings (single authored)) and have recently finished two new conference papers (one for the Annual Law & Society Association Conference this summer (co-authored); one for the Annual American Political Science Association Conference this fall (single authored)). I have been invited to present my findings at Oxford, Northwestern, UC Berkeley, Brandeis, the Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C., and numerous academic conferences, including conferences for the American Political Science Association, Western Political Science Association, New England Political Science Association, Law & Society Association, and the Robert Wood Johnson Annual Health Policy Conference at the Aspen Institute.
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Honors and Awards
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USC, ASHSS Award, 2006-2007
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USC General Education Teaching Award, 2005-2006
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USC PArent Association, Teaching and Mentoring Award, 2005-2006
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USC Raubenheimer Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, 2005-2006
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Robert Wood Johnson Fellow, 2003
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