Tom Burke

Tom Burke is the Jane Bishop ’51 Associate Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard and at the University of California-Berkeley, and a research fellow at the Brookings Institution and with the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Program.

Tom’s research focuses on the place of rights and litigation in public policy. His most recent project examines how organizations respond to social change laws. The first article from this project, “The Diffusion of Rights,” with co-author Jeb Barnes, was published in the fall, 2006 issue of Law and Society Review. Two other articles, “Political Regimes and the Future of the First Amendment,” and "Is There an Empirical Literature on Rights" are both forthcoming in Studies in Law, Politics and Society.

Burke has written about the Americans with Disabilities Act, disability politics in the European Union, American campaign finance law, and the role of rights in American politics. He is the co-author, with Lief Carter, of the updated 7th edition of Reason in Law (2007), and the author of Lawyers, Lawsuits and Legal Rights: The Struggle Over Litigation in American Society (2002).

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Profile last updated: 7/08