McGuinn Hall Room 226
Telephone: 617-552-1896
Email: shep.melnick@bc.edu
Courts; Public Policy
M 4:30-6 pm, W 2-3 pm
R. Shep Melnick is the Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Professor of American Politics at Boston College and co-chair of the Harvard Program on Constitutional Government. He is the author of The Transformation of Title IX: Regulating Gender Equality in Education, (Brookings, 2018), Between the Lines: Interpreting Welfare Rights (Brookings,1994), and Regulation and the Courts: The Case of the Clean Air Act (Brookings, 1983), as well as many articles on courts, agencies, and public policy. He is currently completing a book on education and the civil rights state. In 2012 he received the American Political Science Association Law and Courts Section’s “Lasting Contribution” award. He received his BA and PhD from Harvard, and taught at Harvard and Brandeis before moving to Boston College. He has also been a Research Associate at Brookings, President of the New England Political Science Association, and an elected member of the NH House of Representatives.
The Transformation of Title IX: Regulating Gender Equality in Education (Brookings, 2018)
Taking Stock: American Government in the Twentieth Century, co-edited with Morton Keller (Woodrow Wilson Center and Cambridge Press, 1999)
Between the Lines: Interpreting Welfare Rights (Brookings, 1994)
Regulation and the Courts: The Case of the Clean Air Act (Brookings, 1983)
“Desegregation, Then and Now,” National Affairs, Winter, 2020
“Analyzing the Department of Education’s final Title IX rules on sexual misconduct,” Brookings Report, June 11, 2020
“The Title IX Spotlight Shifts from the Campus to the Schoolhouse,” Education Next, May 27, 2020
“The Mismeasure of ‘Enforcement,’” Education Next Blog, February, 2020
“The Department of Education’s Proposed Sexual Harassment Rules: Looking Beyond the Rhetoric,” Brookings Brief, January, 2019
“The Strange Evolution of Title IX,” National Affairs, Summer, 2018
“Rethinking Federal Regulation of Sexual Harassment: The Need for Debate, not Demagoguery in the Age of Trump,” Education Next, Winter, 2018
“Sexual Harassment and the Evolving Civil Rights State,” in Lynda Dodd, ed., The Rights Revolution Revisited: Institutional Perspectives on the Private Enforcement of Civil Rights in the U.S. (Cambridge, 2018)
“Scalia’s Dilemmas as a Conservative Jurist,” in Paul E. Peterson and Michael W. McConnell, eds., Scalia’s Constitution: Essays on Law and Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
“Adversarial Legalism, Civil Rights, and the Exceptional American State,” in Thomas Burke and Jeb Barnes, eds., Varieties of Legal Order: The Politics of Adversarial and Bureaucratic Legalism (Routledge, 2017)
“Gridlock and the Madisonian Constitution,” in Benjamin Wittes and Pietro Nivola, eds., What Would Madison Do? The Father of the Constitution Meets Modern American Politics (Brookings, 2015)
”The Gridlock Illusion,” The Wilson Quarterly (Winter, 2013)
“Politics as a Vocation: An Appreciation of the Life and Work of James Q. Wilson,” The Forum, vol. 10, #1 (May, 2012)
“Taking Remedies Seriously: Can Courts Control Public Schools?” in Joshua Dunn and Martin West, eds., From Schoolhouse to Courthouse: The Judiciary’s Role in American Education (Brookings, 2009)
Martin Shapiro” in Thomas Ginsburg and Robert Kagan, eds., Institutions and Public Law (Peter Lang, 2005)
“From Tax-and-Spend to Mandate-and-Sue: Liberalism After the Great Society” in Sidney Milkis and Jerome Mileur, eds., The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism (University of Massachusetts Press, 2005)
“Constitutional Bureaucracy,” in Mark Blitz and William Kristol, eds., Educating the Prince: Essays in Honor of Harvey Mansfield (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000)
“Separation of Powers and the Strategy of Rights: The Expansion of Special Education,” in Landy and Levin, eds., The New Politics of Public Policy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)
“Administrative Law and Bureaucratic Reality,” Administrative Law Review (Summer, 1992)
“Pollution Deadlines and The Coalition for Failure,” The Public Interest, (Spring, 1984); reprinted with a new epilogue in Environmental Politics: Public
Costs, Private Rewards, Greve and Smith, eds., (Praeger, 1992)
“The Courts, Congress, and Programmatic Rights,” in Remaking American Politics, Milkis and Harris, eds. (Westview, 1989)