Thomas M

Thomas M. Keck

Tom Keck is the Michael O. Sawyer Chair of Constitutional Law and Politics and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He lives in Syracuse, New York with his partner, Julie Gozan, and their two children. He is a graduate of Baltimore City College, Oberlin College, and Rutgers University. After receiving his Ph.D. in political science in 1999, he taught at the University of Oklahoma for several years before joining the Maxwell School in 2002.

In 2004, the University of Chicago Press published Professor Keck's first book, The Most Activist Supreme Court in History: The Road to Modern Judicial Conservatism. Tracing the rise of conservative judicial activism (and the surprising resilience of liberal judicial activism) on the contemporary Supreme Court, the book received a number of favorable reviews, with Choice recommending that "if you read just one book on the history of the modern Supreme Court, this should probably be the one." Professor Keck's research has also appeared in leading journals in the fields of political science and socio-legal studies. His 2007 article on Supreme Court decision-making, published in the American Political Science Review, received the Houghton Mifflin Award for the best journal article on law and courts written by a political scientist that year. Most recently, writing in the Law and Society Review, he has called into question the widespread scholarly argument that litigation on behalf of LGBT rights has provoked a counter-productive political backlash.

Professor Keck is currently writing a book on the courts and the culture wars during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama eras. In 2008, he received a Sabbatical Fellowship from the American Philosophical Society to support this project. He has delivered more than twenty-five scholarly papers and addresses, including invited talks at Carleton College, Harvard Law School, and Princeton University. He has long been an active member of the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association, serving on the editorial board of the Section's newsletter, the Section's Nominations Committee, the Annual Meeting Program Committee, and the Pritchett, Corwin, and Best Conference Paper Award Committees. He has also chaired the Greenstone Award Committee for APSA's Politics and History Section and served on the Best Conference Paper Award Committee for the Sexuality and Politics Section.

At Syracuse, he has been an elected member of the University Senate since 2007. He has served on the University Senate Committees on LGBT Concerns and on Services to Faculty and Staff. In 2008, he received the Foundation Award for Outstanding Faculty Member, awarded annually by the campus LGBT community to recognize a faculty member's leadership in creating a campus that is inclusive and nurturing for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students, faculty, and staff. As holder of the Sawyer Chair since 2009, Professor Keck directs the Sawyer Law and Politics Program (SLAPP), an interdisciplinary initiative devoted to advancing teaching and research in the field of law and politics.