ADA – Dr. Paul Collins will deliver the annual Rothbaum Lecture on “The Future of the Second Amendment” as East Central University commemorates Constitution Day on Tuesday, Sept. 17, at 7 p.m. at the Ataloa Theatre in the Hallie Brown Ford Fine Arts Center.   The Rothbaum Lecture is funded through an endowment established by the late Julian Rothbaum with a $25,000 gift to the ECU Foundation Inc. that was matched by the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. He also established an endowment to fund the George Nigh Award for ECU’s top graduating senior.   Rothbaum, who lived in Tulsa, was a long-time leader in Oklahoma civic affairs, a 1986 inductee into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame and a former member of the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education and the University of Oklahoma Regents.   Collins, associate professor of political science at the University of North Texas, has obtained numerous research awards, had several published articles and has written a couple of books.   His research focuses on judicial politics, with a particular interest in the democratic nature of the judiciary. Collins’ scholarship is motivated by the desire to apply interdisciplinary approaches to the study of law and courts.   Collins has published articles in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Journal of Politics, Law & Social Inquiry, Law & Society Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Political Research Quarterly, and other journals.   His research has been funded by grants from the Dirksen Congressional Center and the National Science Foundation. He is currently a member of the editorial board of the Justice System Journal and is the list master of the Law and Courts Discussion List.   Collins is the author of two books, Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings and Constitutional Change, coauthored with Lori A. Ringhand, and was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press. Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making was published in 2008 by Oxford University Press and received the 2009 C. Herman Pritchett Award from the Law and Courts Section of the American Political Science Association. The award recognized Friends of the Supreme Court as the best book on law and courts, written by a political scientist.   He holds doctorate and master’s degrees in political science from Binghamton University and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Scranton.   Collins is described as a well-regarded and challenging professor, who teaches courses on American political institutions, interest groups, judicial politics and legal studies at UNT.

 

 

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