Rate My Professor Doug Rice

Rice's research focuses on judicial policymaking in American politics, with particular emphasis on the power of courts in the policymaking process and the implications of delegating policymaking authority to judicial institutions within a democratic system. His work examines judicial decision-making, opinion writing, text-as-data methods, separation of powers dynamics, media coverage of judicial institutions, and the broader influence of courts on public policy. He integrates computational social science techniques to analyze court opinions and related phenomena. Rice was awarded the 2025-26 Faculty Fellowship from the Public Interest Technology Initiative at UMass Amherst to develop responsible AI curriculum for the DACSS program. His publications appear in premier outlets including The Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Political Science Research & Methods, The Journal of Law and Courts, and American Politics Research. Key works include the book Lighting the Way: Federal Courts, Civil Rights, and Public Policy (University of Virginia Press); "Corpus-based Dictionaries for Sentiment Analysis of Specialized Vocabularies" (Political Science Research & Methods, 2019); "Measuring the Political Salience of Supreme Court Cases" (The Journal of Law and Courts, 2015); "Issue Divisions and U.S. Supreme Court Decision Making" (The Journal of Politics, 2016); and "Racial Bias in Legal Language" (Research & Politics, 2019). Rice's scholarship has garnered over 767 citations, contributing substantially to law and courts, American politics, and computational social science.