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Congratulations to five Northwestern Law professors who received grants from the Searle Fund for Public Policy to support their research efforts.

Professors Steve Calabresi, Tonja Jacobi, John McGinnis, Max Schanzenbach, and Albert Yoon were awarded a combined total of $389,367 in grants.

Professor Calabresi will be supervising the Searle Fellowship in Public Law, which the fund will help support. The Searle Fellows program provides a one year-long fellowship at Northwestern Law for an early career scholar with a strong interest in public law, especially structural constitutional law, and the potential to be a successful scholar and teacher. This is the fourth year the Law School, known nationally for excellence in developing young scholars, has received funding for this program.

Professor Jacobi will apply her grant to a study titled "The Subtle Unraveling of Federalism: the Illogic of State Legislative Trends As Proof of Evolving Constitutional Standards," in which she examines the problems for federalism of using State legislative action as evidence of evolving standards under the eighth Amendment.

Professor McGinnis is working on a book arguing that the great idea behind the American Constitution is its embrace of competition in governance. The book will describe how these core ideas of competitive structures of government were endangered by the New Deal and Warren Courts and how they are making a slow and erratic comeback in the jurisprudence of the Rehnquist Court .

Professor Schanzenbach is currently using a previous Searle grant to support a study of the effect of judicial characteristics, the interplay of race and sex, on the sentencing of federal offenders. In a separate paper, he and Professor Emerson Tiller are exploring the sentencing differences between Republican and Democratic appointees. The additional funding will support their construction of a detailed database of about 5,000 observations that would include the identities of sentencing judges and what facts were being disputed at sentencing.

Finally, Professor Yoon will use his grant to study the effect of legal rules designed to encourage parties to resolve civil disputes prior to trial. This is the third in a trilogy of studies of empirical projects on tort reform. His previous projects looked at the effect of damage caps on medical malpractice litigation in the South as well as studied the effect of mandatory arbitration in Nevada relative to neighboring states. In this final project, Yoon seeks to examine the effect of pre-trial settlement rules across multiple areas of civil litigation, including auto disputes, medical malpractice, and corporate transactions.

The Searle Fund provides grants each year to Northwestern University faculty in support of research, education, and publications related to public policy issues. This year's grants were limited to members of select departments and schools at Northwestern. The Fund expects to provide grants totaling $20 million over a period of approximately 20 years.

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