Ben Johnson
Associate Professor of Law
Email:
johnson@law.ufl.edu
Expertise
Corporate Finance • Corporate Governance • Formal and Empirical Methods • Judicial Politics • Supreme Court Agenda Setting •
About
Professor Ben Johnson is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. He researches and writes on governance by committees. Sometimes, the governing committee is a board of directors. Other times, it is a committee of justices at the Supreme Court. His research has won awards from national organizations in law (AALS) and political science (APSA) and can be found in law reviews and peer reviewed outlets. His recent work on the Supreme Court has been published in the Columbia Law Review and Alabama Law Review. Earlier work on district judges with financial conflicts (published in the North Carolina Law Review) led to a large exposé in the Wall Street Journal. His game theoretic model of corporate fiduciary duties is forthcoming at the BYU Law Review. He has ongoing projects on the Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket, corporate fiduciary duties, shareholder voting, and machine learning.
Professor Johnson teaches Corporations (the only course in the curriculum where students learn to build and maintain institutions that can make the world a better place long after they are gone), Empirical Methods for Lawyers, and topics on the federal judiciary.
Education:
Ph.D., Princeton University (Politics)
J.D.. Yale Law School
M.A., Boston University (Economics)
B.A., Baylor University
Teaching:
Corporations, Federal Courts, Empirical Methods for Lawyers, Advanced Corporations (Seminar), Supreme Court Agenda Setting (Seminar)
Publications
Articles
- A Theory of Corporate Fiduciary Duties, BYU L. Rev. (forthcoming).
- The Civil Rights Cases and Black Constitutional Politics, 65 Ariz. L. Rev. (forthcoming) (with Sean Beienburg).
- The Active Vices, 74 Ala. L. Rev. 917 (2023).
- The Origins of Supreme Court Question Selection, 122 Colum. L. Rev.793 (2022) (winner of AALS Federal Courts section award for Best Untenured Article on Federal Jurisdiction).
- Judges Breaking the Law: An Empirical Study of Financially Interested Judges Deciding Cases, 99 N.C. L. Rev. 1 (2020) (with John Newby Parton).
- The Supreme Court’s (Surprising?) Indifference to Public Opinion, 74 Pol. Res. Q. 18 (2020) (with Logan Strother) (Winner of the American Political Science Association’s Law & Courts Section 2020 Best Conference Paper Award).
- The Supreme Court’s Political Docket: How Ideology and the Chief Justice Control the Court’s Agenda and Shape Law, 50 Conn. L. Rev. 581 (2018).
- Why Does the Supreme Court Uphold So Many Laws?, 2018 U. Ill. L. Rev. 1001 (with Keith Whittington).
Shorter and Invited Pieces
- A Response to Two Self-Regulatory Horror Stories, Fl. L. Rev. Forum (2023) (forthcoming).
- The Supreme Court, Question-selection, Legitimacy, and Reform: Three Theorems and One Suggestion, 67 St. Louis U. L.J. 625 (2023) (forthcoming).
- Supreme Court of the United States in Elgar Encyclopedia of Comp. L. (2023).