Jack Knight (born July 13, 1952) is a political scientist and legal theorist. His academic contributions are about political, social, and law theory. He is currently a professor of law, politics, philosophy and economics at Duke University School of Law and at the Duke's Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of several books such as Institutions and Social Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Explaining Social Institutions (The University of Michigan Press, 1995), and The Choices Justices Make (Congressional Quarterly Press, 1997) with which he won the American Political Science Association C. Herman Prichett Award. He has also written many journal articles and edited volumes about democratic theory, rules of law, judicial decision-making, and theories of institutional emergence and change. He has collaborated as a professor and researcher in universities at Washington, Chicago, Michigan, Virginia, Copenhagen, NYU, and Bonn.
Knight holds a bachelor's degree and JD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a MA and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. [1] Professor Knight is a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Stanley Eugene Fish is an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City, although Fish has no degrees or training in law. Fish has previously served as the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a professor of law at Florida International University and is dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Frank Hyneman Knight was an American economist who spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, where he became one of the founders of the Chicago School. Nobel laureates Milton Friedman, George Stigler and James M. Buchanan were all students of Knight at Chicago. Ronald Coase said that Knight, without teaching him, was a major influence on his thinking. F.A. Hayek considered Knight to be one of the major figures in preserving and promoting classical liberal thought in the twentieth century. Paul Samuelson named Knight as one of the several "American saints in economics" born after 1860.
Marshall David Sahlins was an American cultural anthropologist best known for his ethnographic work in the Pacific and for his contributions to anthropological theory. He was Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago.
The Chicago school of economics is a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago, some of whom have constructed and popularized its principles. Milton Friedman and George Stigler are considered the leading scholars of the Chicago school.
Theda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist, who is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She is a highly influential figure in both sociology and political science. She is best known as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, as well as her "state autonomy theory". She has written widely for both popular and academic audiences. She has been President of the American Political Science Association and the Social Science History Association.
Arjun Appadurai is an Indian-American anthropologist recognized as a major theorist in globalization studies. In his anthropological work, he discusses the importance of the modernity of nation states and globalization. He is the former University of Chicago professor of anthropology and South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Humanities Dean of the University of Chicago, director of the city center and globalization at Yale University, and the Education and Human Development Studies professor at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture.
Positive political theory (PPT) or explanatory political theory is the study of politics using formal methods such as social choice theory, game theory, and statistical analysis. In particular, social choice theoretic methods are often used to describe and (axiomatically) analyze the performance of rules or institutions. The outcomes of the rules or institutions described are then analyzed by game theory, where the individuals/parties/nations involved in a given interaction are modeled as rational agents playing a game, guided by self-interest. Based on this assumption, the outcome of the interactions can be predicted as an equilibrium of the game.
Robert Owen Keohane is an American academic working within the fields of International Relations and International Political Economy. Following the publication of his influential book After Hegemony (1984), he has become widely associated with the theory of neoliberal institutionalism, as well as transnational relations and world politics in international relations in the 1970s.
Harold Demsetz was an American professor of economics at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).
Rogers Smith is an American political scientist and author noted for his research and writing on American constitutional and political development and political thought, with a focus on issues of citizenship and racial, gender, and class inequalities.
David Easton was a Canadian-born American political scientist. Easton, who was born in Toronto, Ontario, came to the United States in 1943. From 1947 to 1997, he served as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.
Sherry Beth Ortner is an American cultural anthropologist and has been a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA since 2004.
Leonid "Leo" Hurwicz was a Polish-American economist and mathematician, known for his work in game theory and mechanism design. He originated the concept of incentive compatibility, and showed how desired outcomes can be achieved by using incentive compatible mechanism design. Hurwicz shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work on mechanism design. Hurwicz was one of the oldest Nobel Laureates, having received the prize at the age of 90.
John Herbert Aldrich is an American political scientist and author, known for his research and writings on American politics, elections, and political parties, and on formal theory and methodology in political science.
Roger Bruce Myerson is an American economist and professor at the University of Chicago. He holds the title of the David L. Pearson Distinguished Service Professor of Global Conflict Studies at The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts in the Harris School of Public Policy, the Griffin Department of Economics, and the College. Previously, he held the title The Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor of Economics. In 2007, he was the winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel with Leonid Hurwicz and Eric Maskin for "having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory." He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.
William H. Sewell Jr. is an American academic. He is the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History and Political Science at the University of Chicago.
Michael Curtis Munger is an economist and a former chair of the political science department at Duke University, where he continues to teach political science, public policy, and economics. He is a prolific writer, and his book Analyzing Policy: Choices, Conflicts, and Practices is now a standard work in the field of policy analysis. In 2008 he was the Libertarian candidate for Governor of North Carolina.
John Archibald Fairlie was a Scottish-born political scientist who spent his professional career in the United States.
Mathew Daniel McCubbins was the Ruth F. De Varney Professor of Political Science and Professor of Law, in the Department of Political Science and School of Law at Duke University.
David O’Keefe Sears is an American psychologist who specializes in political psychology. He is a distinguished professor of psychology and political science at the University of California, Los Angeles where he has been teaching since 1961. He served as dean of social sciences at UCLA between 1983 and 1992. Best known for his theory of symbolic racism, Sears has published many articles and books about the political and psychological origins of race relations in America, as well as on political socialization and life cycle effects on attitudes, the role of self-interest in attitudes, and multiculturalism. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991.