Andrew D. Martin


Andrew D Martin is the current chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis. He assumed the office on June 1, 2019.

Biography

Martin was born in Lafayette, Indiana. He holds an A.B. in Mathematics and Government from The College of William and Mary and a PhD in Political Science from Washington University in St. Louis.
After earning his Ph.D in 1998 from WashU, Martin served as an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1998 to 2000.In 2000, he became a professor of both law and political science in the law school and undergraduate school of Arts & Sciences at WashU. In 2006, he became the founding director for the Center for Empirical Research in the Law. From 2007 to 2011, he served as Chair of Political Science Department at Washington University in St. Louis. Next, he was the Vice Dean of the Washington University School of Law from 2012 to 2014.
In 2014, Martin left WashU for four years to serve as dean of the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and as a Professor of Political Science and Statistics at the University of Michigan.
He currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his wife and their young daughter.

Center for Empirical Research in the Law

Martin is the founding director of Washington University’s Center for Empirical Research in the Law. CERL was founded in 2006 under Dean Kent D. Syverud as a research unit within Washington University’s School of Law. CERL provides empirical legal research methods support and training to law faculty and scholars at Washington University, and serves as a point of connection to scholars and faculty at many other universities. At CERL, Martin has guided the technical efforts of several large-scale, nationally regarded data initiatives. CERL’s prominent projects and collaborations include The Discography, The Judicial Elections Data Initiative, and the NSF-sponsored Supreme Court Database.

Scholarship

Spanning judicial politics, quantitative political methodology, and empirical legal studies, Martin’s academic work has been published in a variety of different outlets, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Columbia Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review and Northwestern University Law Review. Martin is the recipient of six grants from the National Science Foundation; his research has also been funded by the American Bar Association, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.
Martin has also made major contributions to statistical computing in the form of software. His most prominent contribution, with Kevin Quinn and Jong Hee Park, is the package MCMCpack “which contains functions for Bayesian posterior simulation using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for a number of statistical models”.

Martin-Quinn scores

One of Martin's most notable scholarly contributions is the Martin-Quinn scores. In this effort he and collaborator Kevin Quinn sought to programmatically identify the ideologies of U.S. Supreme Court justices.

Supreme Court database

The Supreme Court Database is an NSF-funded collaboration among six universities. The project’s inception occurred decades ago as Professor Harold J. Spaeth attempted to document and code every vote put forth by a U.S. Supreme Court justice in all argued cases over a five-decade span. Professor Spaeth's work has become an indispensable body of information for those who study supreme court politics. Professor Martin and CERL’s participation involved overseeing the expansion, including developing a comprehensive dataset as well as facilitating a backdating project that classified data from the founding of the court in 1790 through the current term.

Awards and recognition

Martin is the recipient of a number of awards including the Washington University Outstanding Faculty Mentor award, the Pi Sigma Alpha Award, the Harold Gosnell Prize, and the Mancur Olson award.

Contributions

Martin was mentioned in Ian Ayres’ 2007 book Super Crunchers, where Martin and Quinn created a statistical forecasting model of voting by United States Supreme Court justices which produced superior predictions of votes to predictions by legal experts.