Leah Litman is a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School. Her research examines unidentified and implicit values that are used to structure the legal system, the federal courts, and the legal profession. She is one of the co-hosts and co-creators of “Strict Scrutiny,” a podcast about the US Supreme Court and is a co-creator of Women Also Know Law, a tool to promote the work of women and nonbinary academics. She spoke with SSRN about the intricacies of the Supreme Court and how understanding it is relevant today, both in and beyond academia.

Q: Your body of work has such variety. On top of your experience as a professor and researcher, you’re one of the co-creators of Women Also Know Law, and you also co-host the podcast “Strict Scrutiny.” How is it that you’ve gotten involved in some of these wider-reaching projects, that extend beyond classrooms and research papers?

A: I think it’s a combination of reasons. First is just a little bit of happenstance. I happened to be at Michigan Law School when Emily Prifogle joined the law school as a faculty fellow, and she had been involved in a related project called “Women Also Know History.” There was not yet a “Women Also Know Law” group. “Women Also Know” is a series of organizations related to different disciplines, which seek to highlight the work of women and non-binary academics. So, we just decided to start the legal version.

Similarly, with the podcast, I looked around [and] it seemed like there was not a podcast hosted by several women law professors who wanted to offer a kind of irreverent but also analytical take on the Supreme Court. So again, we just decided to do it and launch it. Five and a half years later, here we are. I think one of the best parts about being an academic is the autonomy you have over what the job looks like and what you do. All of these different things that I’m involved in use very different parts of my brain and different skill sets, and it’s fun to be able to get to do all of them.

Q: In the “Strict Scrutiny” podcast, you and your co-hosts Kate Shaw and Melissa Murray do a great job of talking about the Supreme Court and its legal culture at a broader, more approachable level, while still getting into the nitty gritty of how current events and big legal ideas impact our everyday lives. Why do you think it’s important to communicate with people beyond traditional academic settings about what’s happening in the Supreme Court?

A: First, just as a general academic matter, I think part of what academia is about is producing research in the quest for truth. That, of course, has value beyond just an academic audience. I love to see when academics can translate their work to the broader public or when they can work with other people to do so. Not all academic ideas need to have practical implications or practical output, but for those that do, it’s not going to actually materialize unless you’re able to talk to people outside of academia.

As to the Supreme Court in particular, the Supreme Court is one of the less transparent institutions within the federal government. It’s governed by a set of rules that aren’t all written down, that aren’t all public, and yet it’s extremely consequential and important for our everyday lives, as well as the functioning of our government. We wanted to be able to rectify that by talking about the Supreme Court and bringing it to a broader audience, so people who were interested could learn more about this super important – but still fairly opaque – institution.

Q: Are there any aspects of the Supreme Court and its culture that you wish people understood better?

A: It would be hard to identify just one. I can name a few. One is that I think it’s a mistake to try to understand Supreme Court opinions in isolation. You have to look at them together with previous opinions, related opinions, what’s happening in other areas of law, as well as the political context for the decision, in order to really understand what is going on and how a decision might play out on the ground. We try to offer a more contextual understanding of what the court is doing.

The second thing I would say as far as what people should know about the Supreme Court is the Supreme Court basically has near plenary authority to decide what cases and issues it takes up. So, I think that fact really skews our assessment about what the court is doing at any given time, just because they have such broad authority to select their docket and decide what issues they are focusing on, kind of similar to elected officials.

Q: Your new book, “Lawless,” is set to come out in 2025. Could you give an overview of what this book is about and why you chose to write it now?

A: The full title, which will give you a sense about what it’s about, is “Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories and Bad Vibes.” I’m publishing this with a trade press, rather than an academic press, because it is geared toward the general reader, rather than just the academic reader. What the general gist of the book is, is it goes through five broad areas of law and shows how what the Supreme Court is doing now originated from political movements that began at least several decades ago. Those political movements harnessed certain social attitudes and feelings, and we can understand and actually see the remnants of those feelings and movements within the substantive content of the law and that helps us understand where the Supreme Court might go next. That’s the general arc.

All of these areas of law reflect, I think the nicest word is ambivalence toward different groups that are not, by and large, part of the modern GOP coalition. So, doctrines that kind of stick it to the people who are less well off, doctrines that stick it to younger voters, doctrines that stick it to racial minorities, and it looks at those together with the political makeup of the modern Republican coalition and the policies of the modern Republican party, and shows how the doctrines, in some ways, work in tandem with that.

Q: What encouraged you to start writing the book in the first place?

A: Partially, what happened with the podcast. I mean, the Supreme Court is just so important right now. I have a sense that people really want to understand it. Obviously, we try to do a lot of that in the podcast, but the podcast is just hour-long episodes, you listen to them, it’s an audio format rather than read, and we can’t necessarily go as in depth as we’d like or give all of the long history into every single topic it is we are covering.

I wanted to bring that understanding and context [of] what is happening now to a broader audience, and also help people understand some of the mechanics of the Supreme Court and how it got to be so. The book talks about how the court selects cases or why the Supreme Court has the authority to select cases or why the Supreme Court has the authority to basically decide what issues are in a given case. It discusses various powers that the court has that people might not be aware of and also how those powers developed over time and what they are the product of.

Q: What research or other projects are you working on right now that you’re particularly interested in or excited about?

A: I have a piece that is coming out in the new year in the Texas Law Review called “The New Substantive Due Process.” The basic gist of that piece is it shows how the Supreme Court is refashioning the institutions of the administrative state based on doctrine and body of law that really resembles what is known as substantive due process, the idea that the Constitution protects certain liberties that are not defined or spelled out explicitly in the constitutional text. And while the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have been hostile to the traditional individual rights line of substantive due process, they’ve essentially transmuted it and replicated it as a weapon to wield against the administrative state, even though they don’t call it substantive due process. That’s the one thing I’m working on.

I have [about] three other projects that are in various stages of early research and writing that span a bunch of different topics. One is about federal post-conviction review and remedies. Another is about statutory interpretation and the other is about originalism and attacks on education. Again, one of the best parts about being an academic is I just get to focus on what I find interesting and what I think is important at the given moment.

Q: Do you choose what your focus is based on what’s happening currently in the world, or do you look ahead at issues you think will be important in the next couple of years?

A: It’s a little bit of both. The new substantive due process piece kind of spans both. It illustrates the kind of early seeds of this new substantive due process, but then spends a fair amount of time talking about what might happen over the next, let’s say, decade, if not more, in light of where the Supreme Court appears to be headed. The originalism education project is, I think, more forward-looking than some of the other ones. It’s really a mix of different approaches.

Q: Your most downloaded paper on SSRN is “The New Major Questions Doctrine,” which you co-authored and was posted to SSRN in July of 2022 and published in the Virginia Law Review in September 2023. This paper explores the changes made to the Major Questions Doctrine. How would you explain to someone unfamiliar with this doctrine firstly, what it does, and then what changes have been made to this in recent years, specifically with how the focus is on what a “major” issue is and whether a decision has economic or political significance impacts decision making?

A: The Major Questions Doctrine is a rule about how courts interpret statutes, federal laws. In general, we think about this court as a textualist court that tries to interpret federal statutes based on the best meaning of the words in the statute. The Major Questions Doctrine essentially operates as an exception to that rule. They say, “when we are talking about statutes that give administrative agencies power, we’re not going to adopt the best interpretation of the statute. Instead, we’re going to place a thumb on the scale against agency regulations that are major in order for the agency to have the power to adopt major regulations.” Those need to be spelled out explicitly in the constitutional text, rather than in broad, general language. That’s kind of how the doctrine works.

As far as the changes in it and what has happened, the Supreme Court used the phrase “Major Questions Doctrine” for the first time in West Virginia v. EPA, a 2022 decision. There were seeds of some related ideas in earlier cases, but those cases had basically said, “Look, we’re going to consider the significance of a regulation together with a host of different factors, like the text of the statute, its statutory history, its structure, and if you add all of that together” – and here, “majorness” meant the cost and the sweeping changes that a regulation would make – then that was a reason to think actually the statute doesn’t give the agency that power. But over time, it’s become something quite different, where instead of considering the majorness alongside the text and statutory context and trying to discern its meaning, majorness operates as a threshold consideration, where if the regulation is major, you’re no longer looking for the best interpretation of the text. That’s how the doctrine has changed.

In the paper, we argue that the court has paid increasing focus, not just to the economic significance of a regulation – that is, how much it might cost to private parties – but also to whether there is political controversy surrounding a regulation. That is, whether some people, in particular the Republican Party, is agitated against the regulation.

Q: Have you seen any of the things you wrote about in the paper come to fruition since you wrote it?

A: After we posted the paper, almost a full year later, the Supreme Court issued its major student debt relief case. There, the court invoked the Major Questions Doctrine to conclude that President Biden’s loan forgiveness program for many borrowers of federal loans was illegal and it invoked the Major Questions Doctrine. We think the decision reflected our understanding of the doctrine, in that it focused on the political significance of the regulation – which wasn’t necessarily going to cost private parties that much money, [since] it was just forgiving federal loans – and it focused on political significance. The court quoted an op ed basically saying that student debt relief had engendered emotionally charged opinions and debate. The editors were kind enough to allow us to basically insert two references to the decision into the piece. But we think, yes, how the Supreme Court later applied the doctrine was consistent with what we were saying the court was doing.

Q: You’ve mentioned before, in the podcast, that you enjoy and put a special focus on habeas corpus. What is it about this topic that continues to interest you?

A: Habeas corpus refers to the body of law that allows people who are being detained to challenge the lawfulness of their conviction. Habeas law is governed by a Byzantine body of statutory rules, including the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, as well as a complicated body of judicial common law. So, it’s highly technical. There are a bunch of rules and… it’s unclear how, if at all, the provisions fit together. For someone who likes to puzzle through doctrinal intricacies and is very into the analytic elements of law, I think that’s partially what drove me to it: the fact that there were all of these different bodies of law that were highly technical, that didn’t necessarily seem to relate together but were hugely consequential. They were just requiring a lot of work by courts, by people who are detained, so trying to understand what was happening amidst the mess, is part of what drew me to it.

Q: Is there anything else you want to add about your recent work or about things that you’re especially interested in that you’d want people to know more about?

A: In general, my work is trying to identify the implicit – that is, not explicitly stated values – that are underlying a lot of the doctrines and legal changes we are seeing. I think that’s important, because in order to assess what courts, Congress, [and] political actors are doing, we need to understand what’s motivating them and what’s the driving force behind the doctrine. That’s a general theme.

Q: Law is one of the most prominent disciplines on SSRN. How do you think SSRN contributes to the legal research and scholarship landscape?

A: It’s hugely important because it’s a way of transmitting our work to other academics and to a broader audience in a way that is so much more timely than the longer window of journal publication. You were saying earlier about the “New Major Questions Doctrine” piece that we posted it in July 2022. It wasn’t published until September 2023, and we really wanted to get that piece out basically as soon as the Supreme Court had refashioned and formalized New Major Questions Doctrine so people, including lower courts and litigants, would understand what was happening and be able to evaluate it. The way to do that was to post a paper on SSRN.

More About Leah Litman

Leah Litman is a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School. She teaches and writes on constitutional law, federal courts, and federal post-conviction review. Her research examines unidentified and implicit values that are used to structure the legal system, the federal courts, and the legal profession. In 2023, the American Law Institute named Litman a recipient of its Early Career Scholars Medal, and in the same year, the American Constitution Society recognized Litman with the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Scholar Award. Litman’s recent work has appeared or will appear in many journals, and her writing for popular audiences has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Slate. In addition, she is one of the co-hosts and co-creators of “Strict Scrutiny,” a Crooked Media podcast about the US Supreme Court, which received the 2023 Podcast Academy award (Ambie) for Best Politics or Opinion podcast and a 2023 Anthem Award for its coverage of the Supreme Court overruling Roe v. Wade. She is also a co-creator, together with Emily Prifogle, of Women Also Know Law, a tool to promote the work of women and nonbinary academics.

You can see more work by Leah Litman on her SSRN Author page here.

Joanna Schwartz is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. She teaches Civil Procedure and a variety of courses on police accountability and public interest lawyering and is one of the country’s leading experts on police misconduct litigation. She spoke with SSRN about her research findings on police indemnification practices and qualified immunity and how these subjects fit into a broader civil rights ecosystem.

Q: A lot of your work centers around topics like police misconduct, qualified immunity, indemnification, local government budgeting, and so on. How did your education and early career experience lead you into this kind of work?

A: Most of the questions that I tackle as a scholar first came to me when I was in practice, working for a small civil rights firm in New York City that represented a lot of people who had been abused by police. I also was one of the attorneys for a big class action against New York City Department of Corrections. As I was working on those cases, I began to think about what impact they had. How are the victories actually impacting people and law enforcement agencies on the ground? Those are the kinds of questions that I asked as a young lawyer but didn’t have anywhere near the time to answer during practice.

When I came to UCLA, I had a chance to do my own research. Each of those questions, as I’ve answered them, has prompted a new set of questions, and here I am 15 years later, still asking and answering those questions prompted by my practice.

Q: What continues to drive your passion for the research topics you study?

A: There are a few things that drive my passion. Certainly, getting to know the people involved in these cases, the lawyers bringing these cases, and the challenges that they are facing is inspiring to me. The desire to tell those stories, to try to understand how things happen the way that they do is inspiring. Watching and listening to lawyers who are maneuvering around the system is inspiring.

There’s a separate inspiration, which is a lot of my work has aimed to take seriously and test assumptions that the Supreme Court and other courts make about civil rights litigation. In my view, many of those assumptions are ill founded or based on myths that have very little relationship to reality. So, another half of my inspiration is some maybe overly optimistic view that correcting those perceptions can also correct misunderstandings and what I can see as errors in the law.

Q: Your highest downloaded paper on SSRN is called “Police Indemnification” and was posted on SSRN in 2013. It shares results from your national study of police indemnification practices in 44 of the largest law enforcement agencies across the country, and 37 mid-sized and small agencies. To start, how would you explain what police indemnification is to someone who knows nothing about it? And how did you collect the data for this study?

A: The impetus for this study was a question about who pays when there are successful police misconduct suits: who is actually paying the settlements and judgments in these cases? That’s a question directly inspired by a client that I had while in practice who wanted to know the answer to that very question about his case. When a police officer made a settlement offer, he wanted to know where that money was coming from. That was a question that hadn’t come to my mind until he asked it.

Then, once I became a law professor and had the luxury of trying to answer these questions, I submitted public records requests to simply find out how often police officers pay settlements and judgments entered against them. What I found was that police officers virtually never paid, that 99.98% of the dollars came from local governments or insurers. The reason that police officers very rarely pay is what’s called indemnification. There are state and local laws and promises sometimes written into union agreements that when officers are sued, they will be provided a lawyer and any settlement or judgment entered will be paid for by the government. That is an indemnification agreement.

There are exceptions in those agreements. They often don’t cover bad faith conduct or sometimes when punitive damages are awarded or if an officer is off duty. But part of what I found surprising was that even when there were those exceptions, officers still didn’t pay. There’s a variety of explanations for that, but that was the key finding of the study.

Q: Was that a result that surprised you at that time?

A: My expectation was that officers very rarely paid and were usually indemnified, but I did not expect to see findings as stark as what I ultimately found. To find that they paid less than 0.02% of the dollars paid in these cases was a shock to me.

Q: Going off of the work that you did for that paper, as well as for other studies, articles, etc. I’d love to talk about your book “Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable,” (published in 2023). How did this book build on your earlier studies and bring together the different concepts that you focus on in your research and teaching?

A: My aim with “Shielded” was to translate law review articles and some of these complex legal topics to an audience that is not interested in reading articles with hundreds of footnotes but simply wants to understand how these legal concepts work. The goal is to explain how all of these different shields – or protections – fit together. Often, when there is an exploration of one of these protections, like qualified immunity, it’s treated [as if] it’s operating on its own, when in fact, it’s part of a broader system.

In the book, I have a chapter dedicated to each of the multiple different shields: challenges of finding a lawyer and of pleading a complaint, including enough facts in your case that you can move forward, qualified immunity and the Constitution, and indemnification. My goal is to show how they fit together to a lay audience [and] to accomplish that by telling a number of different stories of people whose lives have been tangibly affected by these various shields.

Q: You’ve shared in other discussions about this book that you focused on writing about how to help people achieve some measure of justice and accountability when officers violate people’s constitutional rights and what the consequences should be for people who abuse their authority. How does this book help foster more realistic and evidence-based conversations about these ideas and how they influence police reform?

A: A lot of opposition to various accountability measures in policing relies on rhetoric that makes it sound like the sky will fall if it is made easier to sue the police – that they will be bankrupted, that no one will ever want to serve as a police officer again, that they will be chilled from taking any decisive action, for fear of all of these negative consequences. Part of the aim of the book is to show how these various shields fit together. For example, a strong, often-stated argument against qualified immunity reform, which is a legal protection that officers have, is that officers will be bankrupted if it’s easier to sue them. The fact of near universal indemnification through state and local statutes and union agreements having nothing to do with qualified immunity should ease concerns about bankrupting officers if they are made to stand suit.

The idea is that offering some sense of the reality of these barriers and how overlapping and strong they are could be a basis to reduce the strength of some of those barriers. All of the arguments in the book drawn from my research really focus on the real-life impact of these doctrines – how they actually impact people when they’re bringing cases.

Q: You mentioned a little bit about qualified immunity, and you’ve done a lot of work in your scholarship surrounding this topic. Can you talk about why qualified immunity has sparked such controversy and what your research has said about the subject?

A: I think qualified immunity has sparked so much controversy because the application of the legal rule has resulted in true miscarriages of justice. Qualified immunity is this legal protection that says that even if an officer has violated the Constitution, they are protected from being sued for damages for money, unless they violated clearly established law. What the Supreme Court has said is that clearly established law can only be found in prior court decisions with virtually identical facts.

What that has led to are cases where police officers stole a quarter of a million dollars in cash and rare coins from someone during a search but kept it for themselves, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said those officers get qualified immunity because it’s not clearly established that you can’t keep evidence after you have lawfully seized it during a search. Unfortunately, we could spend the rest of our conversation talking about examples like that that have really jaw dropping facts.

What I have done in my articles and research about qualified immunity is take the Supreme Court at its word about why we have this protection and explore whether those justifications play out on the ground. I did not aim to become a qualified immunity scholar. This was not something I had set out to do, but when I wrote the police indemnification article, … when I was thinking about the implications of those stark findings, I realized that a driving force for qualified immunity, to protect officers from financial liability, is undermined by these findings.

When I was presenting that research and talking to fellow scholars, I realized that there were other justifications for qualified immunity beyond the desire to protect officers from financial liability. I then aimed to look at other justifications for qualified immunity, including that the qualified immunity doctrine prevents insubstantial cases from going to discovery or trial. In writing my paper “How Qualified Immunity Fails,” I looked at almost 1,200 police misconduct cases to see what role qualified immunity actually plays and found that it’s not a very good tool to shield against discovery or trial in the way that it’s actually applied.

Qualified immunity has also been justified as necessary because it puts officers on notice of their wrongdoing. In another article, “Qualified Immunity’s Boldest Lie,” I looked at police trainings and policies in hundreds of California law enforcement agencies and found that police officers are not trained about the facts and the holdings of the kinds of cases that clearly establish the law, for qualified immunity purposes. So, a lot of my research around qualified immunity has been in that vein, thinking about what the justifications are for qualified immunity doctrine, this extremely powerful protection, and finding that many of those justifications have no relationship to reality.

Q: In your paper “After Qualified Immunity,” you explain that many of the views regarding qualified immunity and what would happen if it were eliminated are overblown. Your paper engages in a more nuanced analysis of what the realistic effects would be. What changes would you want to see happen by removing qualified immunity and how does that compare to your realistic predictions of the changes we could see?

A: “After Qualified Immunity” came out in February 2020, and I would say at the time, it seemed like an academic question and an academic answer. But beginning in May of 2020, with the murder of George Floyd, all of a sudden qualified immunity became a topic on the tips of protesters’ and legislators’ and reporters’ tongues. The possibility of abolishing qualified immunity gained some real salience.

There are two states, Colorado and New Mexico, that each created state rights to sue for constitutional violations without qualified immunity as a defense. So, in some places in the country, … we are in an “after qualified immunity” world. I think that the story is still being written about what the effect is of eliminating qualified immunity in those places, but we are not seeing the sky fall in the ways that opponents of qualified immunity predicted: there is not a huge influx of cases, there is not a huge increase in lawsuit payments. That is consistent with what I predicted in “After Qualified Immunity.”

I expected that it would still be hard to win cases but that the cost and complexity of bringing the cases would decrease, that maybe some lawyers would be more willing to bring more of these cases. Qualified immunity is such a complicated doctrine to overcome, and without qualified immunity, you could focus on what really should be the key issue in these cases, which is whether the Constitution was violated, whether someone’s rights were violated, as opposed to whether a prior court case had sufficiently similar facts to the case at hand. That clarity and focus can also improve police trainings and policies.

As I said in that article, I don’t think that ending qualified immunity will either cause the sky to fall or will be a silver bullet to improve police accountability, but it will make cases more straightforward and less complex to bring and will focus us on this most important question, which is, in my view, whether the Constitution has been violated.

Q: There’s a lot of your work that we didn’t get to touch on so far, so I’m curious: what papers or other research do you want to highlight as particularly interesting or timely?

A: There’s one piece that I wrote back in 2020 called “Civil Rights Ecosystems,” and it’s a piece with ideas that I return to a lot. It essentially makes the point that whether a person whose rights have been violated ever brings a case, whether that case is successful, [and] how much they recover depends significantly on where in the country the violation occurred. I say in the article you should think of a civil rights ecosystem as an interconnected combination of people, – which could be judges, lawyers, juries – legal rules, like the formal rules of qualified immunity and state laws, and practices, like how indemnification works, how negotiations and settlements work. All of those things interact, interrelate, and build on one another.

There are some parts of the country where the ecosystem is far less hospitable to bringing civil rights claims than in other places. In the article, I compare Philadelphia and Houston, which have law enforcement agencies of approximately the same size. In this study period that I looked at, there were 10 times more lawsuits filed in Philadelphia against officers and…100 times more paid to plaintiffs in civil rights cases. I don’t think that is solely attributable to Philadelphia officers being exponentially worse than Houston officers. That’s an article that I really enjoyed writing and thinking through, and I continue to think about it now, five years later.

Q: What do you think SSRN contributes to the world of modern legal research and scholarship?

A: At a [recent] conference, some colleagues and I were talking about judicial review in jeopardy and what is happening in the current moment. Someone I spoke to commented on the fact that the world is changing so rapidly in our field that… by the time an article is formally published in a journal, it may already be a year out of date. This person commented that we’re getting to a place where the key publication is posting on SSRN, because that is the first moment that you get to share your work with the broader legal community, where you’re sharing it with the world.

I use SSRN all the time, certainly to share my own ideas, but also to see what other people are working on. Given how long publication times take, and particularly in this moment where the world and the legal framework is changing so quickly, SSRN is a critically important venue to share ideas. I appreciate that it does not cost money for people to access those articles or to post them. Because of that easy access, it really is the key focal point for dissemination and sharing of ideas.

More About Joanna Schwartz

Joanna Schwartz is the Honorable Harry Pregerson Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. She teaches Civil Procedure and a variety of courses on police accountability and public interest lawyering. She received UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2015 and has served as Vice Dean for Faculty Development and Faculty Director of the David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy. Professor Schwartz is one of the country’s leading experts on police misconduct litigation and the author of “Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable (2023).” Her writing, commentary, and research about police misconduct, qualified immunity, indemnification, and local government budgeting have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CBS News, NPR, and elsewhere, and she has appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air, CBS Sunday Morning, PBS NewsHour, and ABC News, among others. She graduated from Brown University and then Yale Law School, after which she clerked for Judge Denise Cote of the Southern District of New York and Judge Harry Pregerson of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She was then associated with Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady LLP, in New York City, where she specialized in police misconduct, prisoners’ rights, and First Amendment litigation.

You can see more work by Joanna Schwartz on her SSRN Author page here

In a world increasingly defined by polarization and rapid technological change, Max Hui Bai stands at the intersection of psychology, politics, and innovation. As the Director of the Political Belief Lab, an independent research initiative, Max explores how values, identity, and social change shape our beliefs and how those beliefs, in turn, shape society. His work has been featured in The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Nature, and Wired, and has informed organizations like OpenAI and the White House. A former scientist at Stanford’s Polarization and Social Change Lab and Stanford Impact Labs, Max holds a PhD in social psychology from the University of Minnesota and is also the creator of The Publish or Perish Game, a creative satire of academic life that’s been embraced by scholars worldwide. In this interview, Max discusses his journey from academia to independent research, his insights into political polarization, and how new technologies like AI are reshaping the way we study and share social science. 

Q: Can you tell us about the core motivations behind founding the Political Belief Lab and how your research aims to impact society? 

 A: I wanted to continue my academic work, but no longer follow a traditional university career path. Originally, I entered academia for the intellectual freedom to ask interesting questions and work on projects that mattered. That’s still true today. When I finished my postdoc, I realized there were alternative ways to do research. I was drawn to entrepreneurship and saw opportunities to create societal impact beyond the university system. I’d already started a game company and other projects, and running an independent lab felt like the best way to continue my research with greater flexibility. 

Academic jobs were shrinking, funding cuts were widespread, and the tenure process had become increasingly bureaucratic. I knew I could produce high-quality research more efficiently outside a university, with the freedom to set my own agenda. Instead of spending time writing endless grant applications, I could self-fund my lab through my businesses and game sales. 

The goal of my research hasn’t changed: I want to help create a more equitable and tolerant world. My work focuses on the psychological foundations of racism, prejudice, political ideology, and extremism, and how social factors shape the beliefs we hold about these issues. 

Q: Your work spans social psychology, political polarization, and social change. How do you see these fields intersecting in today’s political climate? 

 A: Politics is essentially group behavior at scale, shaped by both beliefs and systems. Policies, laws, and conflicts all stem from our normative beliefs about how the world should work. Whether we think systems are fair or how they should change comes from our underlying psychological dispositions. 

Years of research show that our political beliefs and behaviors are shaped by many factors—personality traits, openness to new experiences, levels of agreeableness, and even genetic predispositions. These factors interact with our environments—whether we grew up in abundance or scarcity, with authoritarian or permissive parents, and through lifelong interactions with caregivers, peers, and society. 

Personality psychology and social psychology are deeply interconnected. Together, they help explain how individual differences and social contexts shape the political beliefs we ultimately adopt. 

Learn More about The Publish or Perish Game here

Q: You’ve already been sharing your work on SSRN. How has the platform influenced your research dissemination and engagement with the academic community? 

 A: SSRN accelerates communication between scholars. I don’t have to wait years for a paper to go through peer review before others can see it. For time-sensitive topics, that speed is invaluable. 

A good example is my research on AI persuasion, recently published in Nature Communications. The study was completed almost two years before it appeared in print. By posting the preprint early, it gained attention from OpenAI, the White House, journalists, and other scholars. In fast-moving areas like AI, the benefits of sharing early far outweigh the costs. 

Q: Given your experience advising organizations like OpenAI and the White House, how do you think emerging technologies will shape the future of social science research? 

A: There’s so much to say. Large language models already speed up my writing process. For example, I can draft a messy methods section and ask a model to clean it up. The same goes for results sections and discussion drafts, it helps me think through implications from multiple perspectives. 

Beyond writing, we’re seeing exciting applications in research design. At Stanford, we experimented with using large language models as simulated participants. By assigning demographic profiles, say, a 30-year-old white man living in Tennessee, we can test experimental stimuli and get results surprisingly close to real human responses. 

This doesn’t replace empirical research, but it’s a powerful tool for pilots: estimating effect sizes, determining sample sizes, debugging surveys, and writing code before running a real study. Generative AI also makes it easier to create experimental materials, graphics, videos, or scenarios that used to take weeks or require outside designers. Overall, it’s making social science research faster, cheaper, and more efficient. 

Q: As someone who’s been involved in academia and entrepreneurship, what advice would you give early-career researchers on publishing and sharing their work effectively? 

A: Start with the right research question. Like a product, your question determines the potential impact of the work. It’s fine to begin with smaller, manageable projects, but eventually, choose questions with big societal relevance; the “upper limit” of your impact is set at the ideation stage. 

Pick something that genuinely excites you. High-impact work requires years of dedication to tasks many others overlook because they’re tedious or unglamorous. Passion is what carries you through the “extra miles.” 

Some of my most meaningful work, not always the most cited, landed in top journals like JPSP because I went beyond what reviewers asked. The same principle applied to my game project, which became a viral phenomenon used as wedding gifts, in classrooms, and to connect families. Its success came from putting in extra effort to ensure quality, accuracy, and engagement, something no one else in the market was doing. And all these things cannot be done if I didn’t have that passion and willingness to go the extra mile in the beginning. Because without that, it’s hard to produce really good work that can have a real impact in the world.  

Q: What are the biggest challenges you face in translating complex social science research into accessible insights for the public? 

 A: I’ve always disliked overly technical papers, even as a scientist. They alienate the public, make journalists’ jobs harder, and reduce the impact of the work. Early in my career, I set a goal: my papers should be understandable by a motivated high school student or at least a college freshman. 

While methods and results sections may be dense, introductions and discussions should read like articles in The New York Times or The Economist. That requires effort and skill, but it’s worth it. 

I also learned from my advisors how to communicate research on platforms like Twitter or BlueSky. Writing a clear, engaging post about your work is an underrated skill and one I think should be part of graduate training. Today, much of our field discourse happens on social media, and the ability to translate your research for a lay audience is essential. 

Q: What future projects or research areas are you most excited about, and how do you plan to share these on platforms like SSRN? 

A: I’m working on an early-stage project about improving communication skills, helping people process and repackage information more effectively. 

We’re at a turning point, like the early industrial or internet revolutions. The AI revolution will create enormous wealth but also social challenges. Many conflicts between nations, organizations, or individuals stem from poor communication and negotiation. 

As a social psychologist and game developer, I’m exploring a gamified tool to teach communication, empathy, and conflict resolution, something like a “Duolingo for communication skills.” It must be engaging enough for daily use and substantive enough to show real improvement, which makes it a tough challenge. But if successful, it could address some of society’s deepest problems. 

Q: What role do you see preprint platforms playing in democratizing access to social science research? 
 
A: Preprint servers already democratize access; anyone can search and read research for free. The next step is making this work visible to the broader public. 

Right now, scientists know where to look, but non-experts rarely stumble upon preprints in fields like physics or astronomy. To truly democratize knowledge, preprint platforms need to think more like magazines or content hubs, bridging the gap between researchers and curious laypeople. 

That shift would require new strategies, audiences, and resources, but it’s where the real opportunity lies. 

Q: What features or tools of SSRN do you find most valuable for your research and outreach efforts? 

A: I find the download and citation metrics especially useful to gauge impact. Posting on a trustworthy, stable platform also matters. SSRN feels like a reliable public archive, like a library. That reliability gives me confidence that my work won’t get lost. 

You can see more work by Max Hui Bai on his SSRN Author page here