Tom Clark

Bio

Tom Clark is a Professor of Political Science and, by courtesy, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. His research and teaching interests are in the political economy of judicial politics, policing and public safety, as well as applied formal theory and statistical methodology. Current research projects focus on two areas. The first is information and policy-making, and is concerned with how institutions work in tandem to shape the content of political outputs. The second is the politics of public safety and criminal justice. His published research examines the politics of law-enforcement and criminal justice, judicial learning and rule-making, interactions among actors within the judiciary, representation on the courts, empirical techniques for estimating judicial preferences and the content of judicial decisions, and the interaction between the judiciary and other institutions.

He is the editor of The Journal of Law & Courts, the flagship journal of the Law & Courts section of the American Political Science Association. Prior to joining Stanford, he was the David and Mary Winton Green Professor at the University of Chicago and before that the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Political Science at Emory University. He has held visiting appointments at Princeton University, Stanford University, the Institute for Advanced Study at the Toulouse School of Economics.

Academic Appointments

• Professor, Political Science
• Hoover Senior Fellow (By courtesy), Hoover Institution

Professional Education

• PhD, Princeton University

2025-26 Courses

• Judicial Politics
  POLISCI 428 (Aut)
• The Politics of American Courts
  POLISCI 123D (Aut)

Stanford Advisees

• Doctoral Dissertation Reader (AC)
  Aaron Spikol