A renowned political scientist and legal theorist, Professor Knight’s scholarly work focuses on modern social and political theory, law and legal theory, and political economy. He holds a joint appointment with Duke Law School and Duke’s Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, where he teaches in the Politics, Philosophy and Economics Program. At the Law School, he teaches courses on social scientific approaches to law and courts, as well as courses on the political economy of social institutions.

Professor Knight’s research focuses on the rules and norms that organize human activities in nations. In addition to study of the motivations and decisions of judges, he has examined the effects of the norm of extensive prior judicial experience as a prerequisite for service on the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as several other aspects of how courts make decisions and how judges choose their positions in opinions.

Professor Knight is the author of several books: Institutions and Social Conflict(Cambridge University Press, 1992), Explaining Social Institutions (with Itai Sened) (The University of Michigan Press, 1995), and The Choices Justices Make(with Lee Epstein) (Congressional Quarterly Press, 1997), which won the American Political Science Association’s C. Herman Prichett Award for the best book published on law and courts. He co-edited Courts, Judges and Politics(McGraw-Hill, 6th Edition, 2005) and has published numerous articles in journals and edited volumes on such topics as democratic theory, the rule of law, judicial decision-making, and theories of institutional emergence and change.

Professor Knight holds a bachelor’s degree and JD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MA and a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago.

Many of the fundamental questions in social science entail an examination of the role played by social institutions. Why do we have so many social institutions? Why do they take one form in one society and quite different ones in others? In what ways do these institutions develop? When and why do they change? Institutions and Social Conflict addresses these questions in two ways. First it offers a thorough critique of a wide range of theories of institutional change, from the classical accounts of Smith, Hume, Marx and Weber to the contemporary approaches of evolutionary theory, the theory of social conventions and the new institutionalism. Secondly, it develops a new theory of institutional change that emphasises the distributional consequences of social institutions. The emergence of institutions is explained as a by-product of distributional conflict in which asymmetries of power in a society generate institutional solutions to conflicts.