Brian Libgober is a political scientist and legal scholar. His research focuses on the political economy of American institutions, with a special emphasis on the making of regulations by executive agencies. Thematically, he is interested in the relationship between economic inequality, interest group power, and the design of legal institutions. Methodologically, his work combines a variety of approaches, including formal models, quantitative empirics, and case studies.
Since July of 2020, Brian has been an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego in the School of Global Policy and Strategy. He is also an affiliate of the Penn Program on Regulation. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow in Political Science at Yale.
His research has been published in the Journal of Politics, the Quantitative Journal of Political Science, and other peer-reviewed journals. He has also published a number of articles in other journal formats, including a law review article called Getting a Lawyer While Black that uses experimental methods to identify and explain discrimination in the market for legal services.
Education
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Ph.D. in Political Science, 2018
Harvard University -
M.A. in Statistics, 2017
Harvard University -
J.D., 2015
University of Michigan Law School -
B.A. in Mathematics and Philsophy, 2010
University of Chicago
Research
Recent Working Papers
- Making Regulators Reasonable: Do Procedural Rationality Requirements Fix Cognitive Bias? (with Benjamin M. Chen).
- Agency Failure and Individual Accountability. Center for the Study of the Administratiave State, Working Paper No. 20-03.
- The Political Ideologies of Organized Interests & Amicus Curiae Briefs: Large-Scale, Social Network Imputation of Ideal Points (with Sahar Abi-Hassan, Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Dino Christenson, and Aaron Kaufman)
- Personnel, Politics, and the Trump Presidency (with Mark Richardson). R&R at PLOS: ONE.
- Linking Datasets on Organizations Using Half A Billion Open Collaborated Records (with Connor Jerzak).
Peer-Reviewed Publications
- Strategic Proposals, Endogenous Comments, and Bias In Rulemaking. 2020. Journal of Politics.
- Meetings, Comments, and the Distributive Politics of Rulemaking. 2020. Quarterly Journal of Political Science.
- Data and methods for analyzing special interest influence in rulemaking (with Daniel Carpenter, Devin Judge-Lord, and Steven Rashin). 2020. Interest Groups & Advocacy.
Other Publications
- Getting a Lawyer While Black: A Field Experiment. 2020. Lewis & Clark Law Review.
- Can the EU be a Constitutional System Without Universal Access to Judical Review. 2015. Michigan Journal of International Law.
Teaching
UC San Diego
- Policy Analysis and Public Welfare: An Introduction to the Policymaking Process. Fall 2021.
- Law and Adminisistration. Spring 2021. Syllabus.
- Bureaucratic Politics. Spring 2021. Syllabus
- Interest Groups and the Policymaking Process. Winter 2021. Syllabus
Yale University
- American Mass Media: Law, Politics, and Policy. Fall 2019. Syllabus
- Money in Politics. Spring 2019. Syllabus
Harvard University
- Formal Models of Domestic Politics. Spring 2017. (Teaching Assistant; Primary Instructor: Horacio Larreguy).
- Bureaucratic Politics (Teaching Assistant; Primary Instructor: Daniel Carpenter)
MIT
- Constitutional Law & Judicial Politics. Spring 2015. (Course Assistant; Primary Instructor: Christopher Warshaw).
University of Michigan
- Mass Media and Election Politics. Fall 2013. (Graduate Student Instructor; Primary Instructor: Nicholas Valentino).