Dear Voir Dire readers, please join me in welcoming professor Melinda Gann Hall to our blog. While she needs no introduction, I’ll provide a little bio information for anyone who is doesn’t follow law and courts or state politics work and is therefore unfamiliar with her scholarship. Melinda earned her Ph.D. at the University of New Orleans in 1983 and is now Professor and Distinguished Faculty at Michigan State University, department of political science.
Her publications, awards, and professional leadership positions are too numerous to list here, but you can find her vitae here. She (along with Chris Bonneau) has recently penned a book, In Defense of Judicial Elections and she is also a co-creator (with Paul Brace) of the well-known State Supreme Court Data Project, funded by NSF. We look forward to her posts and I am sure that you will enjoy her insights.