Kevin Cope

Kevin Cope is a legal scholar and political scientist whose research investigates legal and political decision-making using empirical, comparative, and formal theoretical methods. Substantively, he is most interested in immigration, international political economy, human and civil rights, and judicial ideology. Cope is the past co-president of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies and a co-editor of the inaugural Oxford University Handbook on Comparative Immigration Law.

Cope’s work is published in journals such as the Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Political Science Research and Methods, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Michigan Law Review, American Journal of Comparative Law, and American Journal of International Law.

His short articles have appeared in The Atlantic, FiveThirtyEight, The Washington Post Monkey Cage and Slate. Cope has been interviewed about his research on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and on local radio and television stations.

Before joining the Law School faculty in 2019, Cope served as a judicial clerk to judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and two federal trial courts. He also practiced government enforcement litigation law in Washington, D.C., with Skadden, Arps. In law school, he served as an editor of the Northwestern University Law Review. Cope earned a J.D. from Northwestern University in 2004 and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan in 2020.