Eileen Braman is a fellow at the Brennan Center’s Kohlberg Center on the U.S. Supreme Court. She is also a professor of political science at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research explores decisional norms relating to the appropriate exercise of governing authority as well as Americans’ views on government action and institutions, including the Supreme Court.
Her work employs experimental methods to understand various factors that are relevant in legal decision-making and how the public thinks about the appropriate exercise of judicial, legislative, and executive authority. Her book Constitutional Powers and Politics (Virginia, 2023) explores how citizens think about fundamental change to governing institutions. Her first book, Law, Politics, and Perception (Virginia, 2009), won the C. Herman Pritchett Award for best book from the law and court section of the American Political Science Association. In it, she employs experimental methods to investigate how the policy preferences of legal decision-makers interact with case facts and accepted norms of legal reasoning to produce case outcomes.
Braman has an undergraduate degree from Binghamton University, where she majored in psychology and political science. She has a law degree from Fordham University Law School and a PhD in political science from Ohio State University. Her research has been published in disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals including the American Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, Political Psychology, Law & Society Review, and the Journal of Law and Courts.