Brookings Senior Fellow Sarah Binder Named 2003 Carnegie Scholar

Sarah Binder, a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, has been named one of thirteen 2003 Carnegie scholars by the Carnegie Corporation of New York for her research on how federal judges are chosen. She will receive $100,000 over the next two years to support her research project, “The Politics and Process of Federal Judicial Selection.”

Binder, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University and the author of a new book from the Brookings Institution Press, Stalemate: Causes and Consequences of Legislative Gridlock, will research the institutional and political foundations of the Senate’s role in providing advice and consent for judicial nominations. She will gather historical and contemporary data on nominations and confirmations, chart the progress of nominations as they move through the Senate, and analyze the effectiveness of the current system.

According to a statement from the Carnegie Corporation, based in New York City, scholars are selected annually “to pursue pathbreaking research that expands the intellectual margins of the Corporation?s program areas.”

Binder is the author of several other books, including Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and is co-author of Politics or Principle: Filibustering in the United States Senate (Brookings, 1997). She received her B.A. from Yale in 1986 and her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1995.