Author Archive | Nathaniel Persily, guest-blogging

Thank you for the chance to post here over the past week. Given how much work it is I don’t know how the regular conspirators have time to do anything else. I have now sifted through the 200 or so comments my posts have generated and thought it might be worth responding to them as […]

(coauthored with Stephen Ansolabehere and crossposted) Upon the initiative of my colleague Jamal Greene who has been writing about the popularity of originalism, our July survey included several questions concerning judicial methodology. As cautious as we might be generally about measuring opinion on constitutional questions, our concerns about question wording, issue complexity, and non-salience are […]

It seems pretty clear that the public opinion trends concerning freedom of expression are pointing in a more libertarian direction. We can see that in responses to questions regarding flag burning, hate speech, and indecent speech. The State of the First Amendment (SOFA) Survey has been asking questions related to these issues for a decade, […]

(coauthored with Stephen Ansolabehere and crossposted) As part of our national survey of attitudes toward courts and the Constitution performed by Knowledge Networks this past July, we included several items related to election law and voting rights. We wanted to assess public opinion on some contemporary controversies, such as photo ID laws and election-day registration, […]

First of all, let me take this opportunity to thank Eugene for allowing me to guest blog this week about the survey research I have been conducting with Steve Ansolabehere. We hope to conduct a similar survey annually and are seeking to share the costs and content with interested law professors, along the lines of […]

The survey Stephen Ansolabehere and I placed in the field this past July included many questions on so-called “moral values” issues. Most of the book, Public Opinion and Constitutional Controversy, http://www.amazon.com/Opinion-Constitutional-Controversy-Nathaniel-Persily/dp/0195329422, which I edited with Pat Egan and Jack Citrin, also covers these issues. The trajectories of opinion in this category of issues do not […]