Professor Don Songer
PhD University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
318 Gambrell Hall
Email: dsonger@sc.edu Phone: 803-777-6801

Professor Songer has wide ranging interests in the area of public law. His primary teaching interests include comparative courts, judicial politics and constitutional law. He also serves as the coach of the USC undergraduate Mock Trial team. Much of his research has explored judicial decision making appellate courts, especially the U.S. Courts of Appeals and more recently the top appellate courts in other common law countries.

He was the principal investigator for a seven year, $800,000 project funded by the National Science Foundation to create an extensive multi-user data base on the Courts of Appeals. The first phase was archived at the ICPSR in the summer of 1997. The Courts of Appeals Data Base contains data on a random sample of more than 19,000 decisions of the courts of appeals from 1925 through 1996. He was also one of four principal investigators for The High Courts Judicial Database, a public access database created by Stacia L. Haynie, Reginald S. Sheehan, Donald R. Songer, and C. Neal Tate with the support of grants provided by the Law and Social Science Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide an extensive data base of the decisions of the top appellate courts in ten countries with English common law roots. His particular focus in this project is on the decisions and judges of the Supreme Court of Canada and the Law Lords in England. From this project he has recently written a book on the Supreme Court of Canada and is actively at work on two books that provide comparative analyses of the behavior of judges on appellate courts in ten nations.  Other recent work has included the analysis of the effects of gender on judicial decision making and the role of courts in the expansion of human rights. 

He is the author or co-author of three books and over 50 articles that have appeared in a wide range of journals including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Canadian Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Political Research Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, Law and Society Review, Judicature, Polity, American Politics Research, and Comparative Political Studies.