About

Maya Sen is a political scientist whose interests include law, political economy, race and ethnic politics, and statistical methods. Her research has been published in prominent journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and The Journal of Politics. She has been covered by major outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and National Public Radio. Professor Sen has testified before Congress and presidential commissions on issues related to the federal courts, and her public commentary has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and US News & World Report. Her latest book, Majority Opinions: The Political Consequences of an Out-of-Step Supreme Court, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. She is also the author of The Judicial Tug of War: How Lawyers, Politicians, and Ideological Incentives Shape the American Judiciary and Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics, the latter of which won the 2019 William H. Riker Book Award for best book published in political economy. Professor Sen earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2012, and holds an A.M. in Statistics, an A.B. in Economics from Harvard, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Economics
• Law and economics
• Political economy
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• History
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Is the Supreme Court veering rightward? The ebb and flow of representation

  PNAS Nexus · 2026-02-27

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Conducting novel surveys that allow the first direct comparisons between Supreme Court decisions and public preferences, Jessee et al. find that the Court moved sharply to the right between 2020 and 2021 and attribute this change to the replacement of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Justice Amy Coney Barrett. We extend Jessee et al.'s analysis by presenting additional data gathered between 2022 and 2025. We find that the Supreme Court maintained its conservative position in 2022 but then moderated in 2023 following the backlash to the decision in Dobbs v. Mississippi (2022), which repealed Roe v. Wade (1973). We show that despite the composition of the Court remaining stable and the identity of the median voter being unchanged between 2021 and 2025, there is an ebb and flow to the representativeness of Court decisions, with the institution sometimes further to the right of the public and then sometimes shifting closer to the average voter. However, despite these important periodic shifts, the Court has, since 2021, generally remained in a more conservative position relative to the ideological positioning of the American electorate. Our findings have important implications for the legitimacy of the Court and the stability of the rule of law.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Double-story development in contexts where injustice is ongoing: Learnings from practice

  International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper explores challenges posed to double-story development in situations of ongoing injustice. Located within the Indian context, it proposes various narrative practices to address these challenges and facilitate re-authoring. The paper examines two key practices: contextualising stories and narrative explorations of the body. Additionally, it demonstrates how different narrative maps – externalising, deconstruction, re-authoring, re-membering and bodybased narrative practices – can be interwoven to respond.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Off-Balance: How US Courts Privilege Conservative Policy Outcomes

  Perspectives on Politics · 2025-02-06 · 5 citations

  article

  A growing literature has challenged some of the more influential accounts regarding the role of courts in the development of social and economic policy in the United States. We highlight some of the more durable features of the American federal judiciary that together tend to privilege ideologically conservative outcomes on matters of politics and public policy. Situating the United States in a comparative perspective, we build our argument in three parts. First, we review interdisciplinary accounts documenting how institutional features of US courts—including the unusually strong powers of judicial review—can tilt outcomes in a conservative-leaning direction. Second, we document how these formidable powers interact with judicial selection processes that currently skew the composition of the judiciary in favor of conservative candidates. Third, we show how the combination of the two factors—institutional and compositional—biases federal courts’ interventions toward privileging conservative policy outcomes.

  PublisherDOI

• Ideological Concordance Between Students and Professors

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• A case of barium granuloma of the rectum with yellowish-white mucosa mainly subepithelial

  Progress of Digestive Endoscopy · 2025-06-13

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The patient was a 76-year-old woman. She had been undergoing periodic enteroscopy at another hospital. She was referred to our department for CS. When CS was performed at our hospital, a flat lesion with a yellowish-white color and a diameter of 20 mm was observed on the anterior wall of the lower rectum within 8 cm of the anal verge. NBI of the same area showed that the existing honeycomb network was still present, and a whiteish deposit was clustered in the subepithelium. A biopsy was performed to confirm the presence of subepithelial deposits. Pathological examination revealed infiltration and aggregation of macrophages phagocytosing granular crystals, leading to the diagnosis of barium granuloma.

  PublisherDOI

• Asking about Complex Policies

  Public Opinion Quarterly · 2024-01-01

  articleSenior author

  Abstract As political issues have increased in complexity, public opinion researchers increasingly ask respondents about sophisticated political topics that may require substantive knowledge and analytic skills, raising concerns about survey satisficing. In this note, we examine the correlates of one manifestation of this kind of satisficing—response order effects, or when respondents are more likely to pick the top response options from a list. We do this by analyzing randomized response order experiments embedded in surveys conducted across three years, where 6,291 respondents provided their opinion on 40 complex issues before the Supreme Court. We find an overall response order effect of 2.8 percentage points with substantial heterogeneity related to both question length and respondent knowledge. These factors also interact with one another; among the most sensitive subpopulation—low-knowledge respondents answering long questions—the predicted response order effect was 17.4 percentage points. On the other hand, question complexity and respondent education did not moderate response order effects. Our practical advice for researchers asking about complex issues is that they should focus on being brief, rather than using extra words to make the language simpler.

  PublisherDOI

• The “Odd Party Out” Theory of Certiorari

  The Journal of Politics · 2024-04-03 · 6 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Role of Judge Ideology in Strategic Retirements in U.S. Federal Courts

  Journal of law & empirical analysis. · 2024-05-16 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  The widely recognized phenomenon of federal judges retiring strategically has key implications for the composition of the judiciary, particularly given polarization between the two U.S. political parties. Using fine-grained measures of judicial ideology, we examine how ideology shapes such strategic retirements. First, we show that since Reagan’s election, Democratic appointees to lower federal courts have been more likely to retire strategically than Republican ones. Second, we find that more ideologically conservative Republican appointees are more likely to strategically retire than are moderate Republican appointees but only suggestive evidence of a similar pattern among more liberal Democratic appointees. Third, as explanation, we find that moderate Republican appointees appear to “wait out” retiring strategically under more conservative recent presidents, such as Donald Trump, opting instead to retire under Democrats such as Joe Biden. Taken together, our results offer a key insight: ideology, and not just party, can be an important factor in driving strategic retirement.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Judges’ Professional Experience Impacts Case Outcomes: An Examination of Public Defenders and Criminal Sentencing

  The Journal of Politics · 2024-12-20 · 5 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Effects of a US Supreme Court ruling to restrict abortion rights

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2023-11-09 · 38 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Adam Bonica

  45 shared

• Adam Chilton

  45 shared

• Cait Unkovic

  42 shared

• Kevin M. Quinn

  University of California, Berkeley

  42 shared

• Jennifer L. Hochschild

  34 shared

• Kyle Rozema

  29 shared

• Avidit Acharya

  18 shared

• Matthew Blackwell

  18 shared

Awards & honors

• 2019 William H. Riker Book Award for best book published in…