Doug Spencer

Professor

UConn School of Law and Department of Public Policy

Education

B.A., Columbia University, Philosophy, 2004
M.P.P, University of California, Berkeley, Goldman School of Public Policy, 2008
J.D., University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, 2011
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, Jurisprudence and Social Policy, 2013

Teaching & Research Interests

Law and public policy
Voting rights
Campaign finance
Survey research
Quantitative research methods
Public policy analysis

Dr. Doug Spencer

Doug Spencer is a Professor of Law and Public Policy at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on the institutional regulation of elections and challenges some of the long-held assumptions that have motivated election policy changes over the last decade. Most recently, he used a set of national surveys to examine the geography of voter discrimination and its impact for voting rights in the wake of Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in June 2013. Professor Spencer was a law clerk at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco and has worked at the U.S. Department of the Interior and the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group in Washington, D.C. In 2005 he was an election monitor during the Thailand national parliamentary elections and later worked as a non-resident researcher for the Pew Center on the States’ Military and Overseas Voting Reform Project. He received an M.P.P., a J.D., and a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley.