Levin College of Law
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Ben Johnson

Associate Professor of Law

Expertise

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

About

Professor Ben Johnson is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. His research on federal appellate jurisdiction has been published in The Yale Law Journal (forthcoming), Columbia Law Review, mainline law reviews at Notre Dame, 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. A book manuscript on the topic is currently at the revise and resubmit stage at Oxford University Press. 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.

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 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).

 

University of Florida Levin College of Law
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The Florida Constitutional Law Endowment in memory of Justice Ben F. Overton was created by Judge Karen Miller in 2013. This fund supports lectures and presentations by Justices of the Florida Supreme Court at the Fredric G. Levin College of Law.

HISTORY

Justice Overton, who earned his B.S. in 1951 and his Juris Doctor in 1952 from the University of Florida, was the first merit appointment to the Florida Supreme Court. Throughout his career he was active in legal education and served as an Adjunct Professor at the Levin College of Law through December 2012, the month of his death. Although he resided at Oak Hammock at the University of Florida, a continuing care retirement community developed in cooperation with UF, he also considered the Florida Supreme Court “home.” Among the high points of his later years was hosting Justices of the Florida Supreme Court in Gainesville and taking his class to Tallahassee to hear oral arguments at the Florida Supreme Court.
Judge Miller, who earned her B.S. cum laude from New York University in 1974 and her Juris Doctor from New York Law School in 1977, served as Chief Administrative Law Judge of the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, New York City’s business regulatory agency, before she retired to Oak Hammock at the University of Florida. Having accompanied Justice Overton on his excursions to Tallahassee and joined him in welcoming guests to Oak Hammock at the University of Florida, she created the endowment in memory of Justice Overton to ensure that the Levin College of Law continues to have the funding necessary to continue and enhance the interaction between its students and the Florida Supreme Court.

 

Judge Miller remembered the event that motivated the endowment.

 

Prior to a dinner at the home of Dean Robert Jerry and Lisa Jerry shortly after Justice Overton’s death, Justice Barbara Pariente and I were discussing a suitable memorial. Justice Pariente, who had been Justice Overton’s colleague on the Florida Supreme Court and who understood the importance to him of the interaction between his students and the Court, suggested the outline of what has become the Overton lectures. Dean Jerry, who has since retired, as has Dean Emeritus Jon Mills, who assumed responsibility for implementing the Overton lectures, were very supportive from the beginning. Since Dean Mills’ retirement, Professor Timothy McClendon, who assisted both Justice Overton and Dean Mills teaching Florida Constitutional Law and who co-authored the recent Florida Constitutional Law casebook, has continued the Overton lectures with the support of Interim Dean Merritt McAlister and CGR director, Professor Danaya Wright.

Justice Overton was a devoted jurist, educator, and ethical leader of the Florida legal profession. The Overton Lecture Series brings Florida Supreme Court Justices to the University of Florida, Levin College of Law, and serves to introduce students to the inner workings of the Court. CGR and the students of the College of Law extend our deepest gratitude to Judge Karen Miller for making the Overton Lectures possible in perpetuity.

You can watch an interview for the Florida Historical Society by Mary Adkins, professor emeritus of the UF Levin College of Law, with Justice Overton here.

Justice Overton was also interviewed for the Samuel Proctor Oral History Project and a transcript of his interview is available at the Smathers Library, and here.
Justice Overton sat on the Constitution Revision Commission of 1977-78 that proposed a right to privacy in the Florida Constitution. Although it failed as part of the Constitution Revision Commission recommendations, it passed in 1980 when proposed by the legislature. The bill was co-sponsored by our very own Jon Mills. The privacy provision prevailed by greater than 60%. Justice Overton then wrote a concurrence in a critical reproductive rights case in 1989 affirming that the privacy provision of the Florida Constitution included the right to obtain an abortion. That decision was overruled in Planned Parenthood of SW and Central Florida v. Florida. You can read about the role of Justice Overton, Jon Mills – director emeritus of CGR, and the history of the 1989 case here.