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Each year, a cohort of 20-plus MU undergrads makes the trek eastward to the capital in early June to take part in the Kinder Institute’s annual Kinder Scholars D.C. Summer Program. Through the program, they spend the next two months interning at various sites throughout Washington, reading and discussing materials for the co-taught “Beltway History […]

In a real-time update of last week’s interview on gerrymandering, MU Political Science Professor and Kinder Institute faculty member Jay Dow sat down with Newsy’s Cliff Judy to weigh in on the Supreme Court’s June 18 decision against intervening in two high-profile partisan gerrymanders—a Democratic gerrymander in Maryland and a Republican gerrymander in Wisconsin.

It’s the practice of drawing voting districts that gives one person’s vote more weight than another’s. And while that sounds blatantly unfair, gerrymandering is as old as the republic itself—it was used in the very first congressional elections for a seat in Virginia. The Supreme Court heard two cases in the past year—Gill v. Whitford […]

Many legal experts believe the Supreme Court will inevitably hear a case about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. But historically, justices of the nation’s highest court have largely deferred to the executive branch on issues such as immigration and national security. And SCOTUS is especially hesitant to get involved in any […]

In Jacksonian America, as Grund exposes, the wealthy inhabitants of northern cities and the plantation South may have been willing to accept their poorer neighbors as political and legal peers, but rarely as social equals. In this important work, he thus sheds light on the nature of the struggle between “aristocracy” and “democracy” that loomed […]

As part of the Kinder Institute’s “Global History at Oxford” alumni and undergraduate study abroad trip, Corpus Christi College (Oxford) Senior Research Fellow Nigel Bowles gave a March 29 after-dinner talk on the “Special Relationship.”