Jerry Goldman
Professor Jerry Goldman has been a member of the political science faculty at Northwestern University for more than thirty years. His research interests cover the American judiciary, American politics, information technology, and research methods. He teaches classes on constitutional law, civil rights and liberties, and American government and politics. Goldman is now on extended leave to work under the university's information technology sector while completing his NSF-sponsored work on Supreme Court audio.
Goldman has focused considerable energy over the last fifteen years on the application of information technology to the U.S. Supreme Court. He directs the OYEZ Project, a vast multimedia archive devoted to the Court, the justices, and the cases they hear and decide. Among its many facets is a treasure-trove of Supreme Court arguments that can be delivered from the web either through an interactive player or via mp3 downloads. With major support from the National Science Foundation, Goldman and his co-investigators will create a complete archive of all Supreme Court audio from October 1955 to the present. The audio will be searchable, retrievable and capable of annotation.
In 2002-2003, Goldman served as co-leader for US- and EU-sponsored working group to consider the problems and prospects for use of high-value, large-scale audio archives in analog and digital format in the world. The group's report, published in 2005, sets out a research agenda for the use of spoken-word collections.Goldman, with fellow political scientists Kenneth Janda and Jeffrey M. Berry, is co-author of the leading American government textbook, The Challenge of Democracy. Now in its 9th edition (2008), The Challenge helped re-shape the direction of instruction in American politics. The textbook has been translated into Korean, Czech, Hungarian, Georgian and Russian.
Goldman also worked with Kent Portney and Steve Cohen (Tufts) to create the first multimedia, internet-based simulation of criminal sentencing practices. Working with a major grant from the U.S. Department of Education, "Crime and Punishment" enabled instructors to simulate an actual criminal sentencing hearing for their students and then capture student responses for quick analysis. The project won the prize for best instructional software from the American Political Science Association section on Computers and Multimedia and the first Rowman & Littlefield Prize for Innovative Teaching in Political Science.
Major awards: EDUCOM Prize (1997); ABA Silver Gavel for Public Understanding of Law (1998); McCormack Chair for Teaching Excellence (1992-1995); American Political Science Association, Section on Law and Courts: Teaching and Mentoring Prize (2004); Farrell Prize for Teaching Excellence, Political Science (Northwestern) (2005); and several awards for software development from the American Political Science Association, Section on Information Technology and Politics.
Professor of
Political Science
Political Science
Northwestern University