THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Gerald N. Rosenberg is Associate Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Lecturer in Law with interests in American politics and public law. His main focus is on the use of courts to further the rights and interests of the relatively disadvantaged. His book The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? overturns a generation of conventional wisdom about the impact of court decisions. The book was awarded the Wadsworth Publishing Award by the American Political Science Association for making a lasting contribution to the field of law and courts, the Gordon J. Laing Prize from the University of Chicago Press (for a book written by a faculty member that brings the greatest distinction to the University of Chicago Press) and the D. Francis Bustin Prize from the University of Chicago Law School. In addition to his scholarship, Rosenberg received a Quantrell Award for his teaching and four graduate students whose work he has supervised have won six national awards.
Rosenberg has taught at Yale University, Northwestern University School of Law (where he served as the Jack N. Pritzker Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law), and at the Law School of Xiamen University in China as a Fulbright Professor during the 2002-03 academic year. In the 1995-1996 academic year he was a Visiting Fellow in the Law Program of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.
Rosenberg is trained as both a political scientist and a lawyer. He earned a master's degree in Politics and Philosophy from Oxford University, a law degree from the University of Michigan, and a doctorate in Political Science from Yale University. A member of the Washington, DC bar, his work has appeared in the University of Chicago Law Review, the University of Virginia Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Law & Social Inquiry, NOMOS, Supreme Court Review, the Journal of Supreme Court History, the Green Bag, and other law reviews and journals. He has contributed to multiple edited collections.
Recent Research / Recent Publications
The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social Change? (University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed. 2008).
"The Sorrow and the Pity: Kent State, Political Dissent and the Misguided Worship of the First Amendment," in The Boundaries of Freedom of Expression and Order in A Democratic Society, ed. Thomas R. Hensley (Kent State University Press, 2001): 17-37.
"The Irrelevant Court: The Supreme Court's Inability to Influence Popular Beliefs about Equality (or anything else)," in Redefining Equality, eds. Neal Devins and Dave Douglas (Oxford University Press, 1998): 172-190.