Emily Zackin

Emily Zackin is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her work focuses on federalism,  American political and constitutional development, and the complex interplay between policy, law, and social movement activism. 

Her first book, Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places: Why State Constitutions Contain America's Positive Rights (Princeton, 2013) examines how positive rights have been enshrined  in America’s state constitutions. The book focuses on the campaign for education rights, which spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the movement for positive labor rights, which occurred during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the push to add environmental bills of rights to state constitutions during the 1960s and 1970s. 

Her most recent co-authored book, The Political Development of American Debt Relief (Chicago, 2024), traces how geographic, sectoral, and racial politics shaped debtor activism over time. 

Selected publications

The Political Development of American Debt Relief (with Chloe N. Thurston), Chicago University Press, 2024. 

Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places: Why State Constitutions Contain America's Positive Rights, Princeton University Press, 2013.