Thomas M Keck
Biographic Data
| ID | 1024378 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas M Keck |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas M |
| FAMILY NAME | Keck |
| SIGNATURE | KECK T M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Syracuse University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2819-0830 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 113 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Free speech, academic freedom, and democratic backsliding in the Trump-era United States
This paper offers an account of the relationship between free speech and academic freedom. It argues that these principles, properly understood, sometimes cut against one another in practice. It then canvasses two sets of threats to academic freedom in the Trump-era United States: left-wing ‘political correctness’ or ‘cancel culture’ and right-wing legislative and executive incursions on university autonomy. The former threat long predates Donald…
The U.S. Supreme Court and democratic backsliding
This paper assesses the performance of the Supreme Court as democratic guardrail during five prior periods of democratic crisis in the United States. It finds that most such periods witnessed efforts by the governing regime to entrench themselves in power, and that the Court has rarely provided an effective check on such democratic abuses. Rather than serving as a reliable democratic guardrail, the Court has regularly exercised what Dixon and Lan…
Minority Rights, Governing Regimes, or Secular Elites
This paper draws on new data regarding judicial decisions involving religious and anti-religious expression to map the political beneficiaries of judicial empowerment. In particular, the paper assesses the extent to which free-expression decisions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights have favored claimants who are religious majorities, religious minorities, or secular elites. We find the U.S. doctrine relatively mor…
Erosion, Backsliding, or Abuse
Drawing on Rosalind Dixon and David Landau’s Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal Globalization and the Subversion of Liberal Democracy , this review essay calls attention to three competing metaphors for democratic decline (democratic erosion, democratic backsliding, and abusive constitutionalism) and elaborates their implications for how supporters of liberal democracy might arrest and reverse the decline. Drawing on Richard L. Hasen’s Cheap…
Diplomats in Robes
A substantial body of scholarly research has examined decision-making in domestic high courts, but international judicial behavior remains relatively poorly understood. Building on research that uses judges’ career background as a proxy for their motivations at the European Court of Human Rights, we deploy a new measure of judicial career backgrounds and a new dataset of the Court’s free expression decisions. We combine quantitative analysis of j…
Free Expression and Judicial Power in Colombia, India, and South Africa
The growth of judicial power globally has renewed scholarly debates about who benefits from increased judicial authority. Using original data, we examine the full universe of constitutional free expression decisions issued by three apex courts—in Colombia, India, and South Africa—across three categories of disputes that feature a diverse array of rights claimants. By so doing, we shed light on the limits of elite-driven accounts of judicial empow…
Movement Litigation and Unilateral Disarmament
Detractors have long criticized the use of courts to achieve social change because judicial victories tend to provoke counterproductive political backlashes. Backlash arguments typically assert or imply that if movement litigators had relied on democratic rather than judicial politics, their policy victories would have been better insulated from opposition. We argue that these accounts wrongly assume that the unilateral decision by a group of mov…
Judicial Politics in Polarized Times
Beyond Backlash
This article evaluates the widespread scholarly claim that the courtroom victories of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights movement have invariably provoked a counterproductive political backlash. Those victories have indeed provoked conservative countermobilization, but that has not been their only or even their most prominent effect. Assessing the political reaction to the movement's judicial victories, the policy impact of those …
Party Politics or Judicial Independence? The Regime Politics Literature Hits the Law Schools
Focusing on recent books published by Michael Klarman, Mark Tushnet, and Jeffrey Rosen, this article traces the development of a longstanding tradition of Supreme Court scholarship within political science (the literature) and its recent migration to the legal academy. These recent books provide illuminating accounts of the Court’s relationship to the broader political system, and they collectively represent a significant improvement over convent…
Party, Policy, or Duty
This paper explores three competing accounts of judicial review by comparing the enacting and invalidating coalitions for each of the fifty-three federal statutes struck down by the Supreme Court during its 1981 through 2005 terms. When a Republican judicial coalition invalidates a Democratic statute, the Court's decision is consistent with a partisan account, and when a conservative judicial coalition invalidates a liberal statute, the decision …
Queering the Rehnquist Court
Activism and Restraint on the Rehnquist Court
This essay explains a tension on the contemporary Supreme Court that has been widely noted but not well understood. Though constitutional conservatives have long advocated judicial restraint, the Rehnquist Court has exercised its own power quite actively, going so far as to enter the "political thicket" of the 2000 presidential election. The complex pattern of conservative influence on the modern Court cannot be explained by reference to either l…
Television News and the Supreme Court
Beyond Backlash
This article evaluates the widespread scholarly claim that the courtroom victories of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights movement have invariably provoked a counterproductive political backlash. Those victories have indeed provoked conservative countermobilization, but that has not been their only or even their most prominent effect. Assessing the political reaction to the movement's judicial victories, the policy impact of those …
Party, Policy, or Duty
This paper explores three competing accounts of judicial review by comparing the enacting and invalidating coalitions for each of the fifty-three federal statutes struck down by the Supreme Court during its 1981 through 2005 terms. When a Republican judicial coalition invalidates a Democratic statute, the Court's decision is consistent with a partisan account, and when a conservative judicial coalition invalidates a liberal statute, the decision …
Movement Litigation and Unilateral Disarmament
Detractors have long criticized the use of courts to achieve social change because judicial victories tend to provoke counterproductive political backlashes. Backlash arguments typically assert or imply that if movement litigators had relied on democratic rather than judicial politics, their policy victories would have been better insulated from opposition. We argue that these accounts wrongly assume that the unilateral decision by a group of mov…
Party Politics or Judicial Independence? The Regime Politics Literature Hits the Law Schools
Focusing on recent books published by Michael Klarman, Mark Tushnet, and Jeffrey Rosen, this article traces the development of a longstanding tradition of Supreme Court scholarship within political science (the literature) and its recent migration to the legal academy. These recent books provide illuminating accounts of the Court’s relationship to the broader political system, and they collectively represent a significant improvement over convent…
The U.S. Supreme Court and democratic backsliding
This paper assesses the performance of the Supreme Court as democratic guardrail during five prior periods of democratic crisis in the United States. It finds that most such periods witnessed efforts by the governing regime to entrench themselves in power, and that the Court has rarely provided an effective check on such democratic abuses. Rather than serving as a reliable democratic guardrail, the Court has regularly exercised what Dixon and Lan…
Erosion, Backsliding, or Abuse
Drawing on Rosalind Dixon and David Landau’s Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal Globalization and the Subversion of Liberal Democracy , this review essay calls attention to three competing metaphors for democratic decline (democratic erosion, democratic backsliding, and abusive constitutionalism) and elaborates their implications for how supporters of liberal democracy might arrest and reverse the decline. Drawing on Richard L. Hasen’s Cheap…
Free Expression and Judicial Power in Colombia, India, and South Africa
The growth of judicial power globally has renewed scholarly debates about who benefits from increased judicial authority. Using original data, we examine the full universe of constitutional free expression decisions issued by three apex courts—in Colombia, India, and South Africa—across three categories of disputes that feature a diverse array of rights claimants. By so doing, we shed light on the limits of elite-driven accounts of judicial empow…
Activism and Restraint on the Rehnquist Court
This essay explains a tension on the contemporary Supreme Court that has been widely noted but not well understood. Though constitutional conservatives have long advocated judicial restraint, the Rehnquist Court has exercised its own power quite actively, going so far as to enter the "political thicket" of the 2000 presidential election. The complex pattern of conservative influence on the modern Court cannot be explained by reference to either l…
Television News and the Supreme Court
Activism and Restraint on the Rehnquist Court
This essay explains a tension on the contemporary Supreme Court that has been widely noted but not well understood. Though constitutional conservatives have long advocated judicial restraint, the Rehnquist Court has exercised its own power quite actively, going so far as to enter the "political thicket" of the 2000 presidential election. The complex pattern of conservative influence on the modern Court cannot be explained by reference to either l…
Queering the Rehnquist Court
Party Politics or Judicial Independence? The Regime Politics Literature Hits the Law Schools
Focusing on recent books published by Michael Klarman, Mark Tushnet, and Jeffrey Rosen, this article traces the development of a longstanding tradition of Supreme Court scholarship within political science (the literature) and its recent migration to the legal academy. These recent books provide illuminating accounts of the Court’s relationship to the broader political system, and they collectively represent a significant improvement over convent…
Party, Policy, or Duty
This paper explores three competing accounts of judicial review by comparing the enacting and invalidating coalitions for each of the fifty-three federal statutes struck down by the Supreme Court during its 1981 through 2005 terms. When a Republican judicial coalition invalidates a Democratic statute, the Court's decision is consistent with a partisan account, and when a conservative judicial coalition invalidates a liberal statute, the decision …
Beyond Backlash
This article evaluates the widespread scholarly claim that the courtroom victories of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights movement have invariably provoked a counterproductive political backlash. Those victories have indeed provoked conservative countermobilization, but that has not been their only or even their most prominent effect. Assessing the political reaction to the movement's judicial victories, the policy impact of those …
Movement Litigation and Unilateral Disarmament
Detractors have long criticized the use of courts to achieve social change because judicial victories tend to provoke counterproductive political backlashes. Backlash arguments typically assert or imply that if movement litigators had relied on democratic rather than judicial politics, their policy victories would have been better insulated from opposition. We argue that these accounts wrongly assume that the unilateral decision by a group of mov…
Judicial Politics in Polarized Times
Free Expression and Judicial Power in Colombia, India, and South Africa
The growth of judicial power globally has renewed scholarly debates about who benefits from increased judicial authority. Using original data, we examine the full universe of constitutional free expression decisions issued by three apex courts—in Colombia, India, and South Africa—across three categories of disputes that feature a diverse array of rights claimants. By so doing, we shed light on the limits of elite-driven accounts of judicial empow…
Diplomats in Robes
A substantial body of scholarly research has examined decision-making in domestic high courts, but international judicial behavior remains relatively poorly understood. Building on research that uses judges’ career background as a proxy for their motivations at the European Court of Human Rights, we deploy a new measure of judicial career backgrounds and a new dataset of the Court’s free expression decisions. We combine quantitative analysis of j…
Minority Rights, Governing Regimes, or Secular Elites
This paper draws on new data regarding judicial decisions involving religious and anti-religious expression to map the political beneficiaries of judicial empowerment. In particular, the paper assesses the extent to which free-expression decisions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights have favored claimants who are religious majorities, religious minorities, or secular elites. We find the U.S. doctrine relatively mor…
Erosion, Backsliding, or Abuse
Drawing on Rosalind Dixon and David Landau’s Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal Globalization and the Subversion of Liberal Democracy , this review essay calls attention to three competing metaphors for democratic decline (democratic erosion, democratic backsliding, and abusive constitutionalism) and elaborates their implications for how supporters of liberal democracy might arrest and reverse the decline. Drawing on Richard L. Hasen’s Cheap…
The U.S. Supreme Court and democratic backsliding
This paper assesses the performance of the Supreme Court as democratic guardrail during five prior periods of democratic crisis in the United States. It finds that most such periods witnessed efforts by the governing regime to entrench themselves in power, and that the Court has rarely provided an effective check on such democratic abuses. Rather than serving as a reliable democratic guardrail, the Court has regularly exercised what Dixon and Lan…
Free speech, academic freedom, and democratic backsliding in the Trump-era United States
This paper offers an account of the relationship between free speech and academic freedom. It argues that these principles, properly understood, sometimes cut against one another in practice. It then canvasses two sets of threats to academic freedom in the Trump-era United States: left-wing ‘political correctness’ or ‘cancel culture’ and right-wing legislative and executive incursions on university autonomy. The former threat long predates Donald…
Law (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Judicial and Constitutional Studies (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Politics (10 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Legal and Constitutional Studies (7 works) · Supreme court (7 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (4 works) · Democracy (4 works)