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Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson

Professor of Law

johnson@law.ufl.edu

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SSRN

Ben Johnson

Professor of Law

Professor Ben Johnson is a Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. His research on federal courts has been published in The Yale Law Journal (forthcoming), Columbia Law Review, mainline law reviews at Notre Dame, North Carolina, Alabama, and Connecticut and has won national awards from the American Association of Law Schools and the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers. His article on the empirical relationship between the Supreme Court and public sentiment (coauthored with Logan Strother) won a national award from the American Political Science Association and appeared in Political Research Quarterly. In addition to his research on federal courts, he has ongoing projects in machine learning, judicial politics, and formal theory.

Education:

Ph.D., Princeton University (Politics)
J.D.. Yale Law School
M.A., Boston University (Economics)
B.A., Baylor University


Expertise

Corporate Law, Federal Appellate Jurisdiction, Federal Courts, Formal and Quantitative Methods


Courses

  • Federal Courts
  • Empirical Methods
  • Supreme Court agenda setting
  • Business Associations
  • Law & Accounting/Finance


Publications

Articles by subject

Federal Courts

  • The Roberts Court’s (Other) Vacatur Revolution, 135 Yale L.J. (forthcoming).
  • May Federal Courts Answer Questions When Not Deciding Cases?, 100 Notre Dame L. Rev. 583 (2025).
  • 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 Political Docket: How Ideology and the Chief Justice Control the Court’s Agenda and Shape Law, 50 Conn. L. Rev. 581 (2018).

Various and Sundry Topics

  • Should Like Cases Be Decided Alike? A Formal Analysis of Formal Equality, 54 J. Legal Stud. 83 (2025) (with Richard Jordan).
  • A Theory of Corporate Fiduciary Duties, 49 BYU L. Rev. 1013 (2024).
  • The Civil Rights Cases and Black Constitutional Politics, 65 Ariz. L. Rev. 579 (2023) (with Sean Beienburg).
  • 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).
  • Why Does the Supreme Court Uphold So Many Laws?, 2018 U. Ill. L. Rev. 1001 (with Keith Whittington).

Shorter and Invited Pieces

  • The Little-Known Rule Change that Made the Supreme Court So Powerful, The Atlantic (December 18, 2023).
  • What About the Bar?, 74 Fla. L. Rev. F. 50 (2023).
  • 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).