I’m delighted to report that Prof. Nathaniel Persily of Columbia Law School will be guest-blogging this coming week about new work that he, Harvard Government Professor Stephen Ansolabehere, and fellow Columbia Law School professor Jamal Greene have been doing related to public opinion on various constitutional issues.
Last year, Prof. Persily coedited Public Opinion and Constitutional Controversy (published by the Oxford University Press), which presents polling data over the last 50 years on thirteen different constitutional issues and examines public opinion trends following salient court decisions. This past summer, he and Profs. Ansolabahere and Greene conducted a further national public opinion survey on a range of constitutional questions, from traditional ones on issues such as abortion, gun rights, and same sex marriage, to ones on constitutional interpretation, concerning originalism, empathy, and the like. They hope to conduct this national survey every year, and to open it up to questions and cost-sharing with other law schools, emulating the successful Cooperative Congressional Election Survey model that Ansolabehere established for political scientists.
Prof. Persily’s blog posts will give us a first peek at introducing the results of this first survey; and I hope they will also pique interest in his larger project.