Experts in the News | Miller Center

How Ketanji Brown Jackson found a path between confrontation and compromise

At Harvard, she won a competition to be an editor on the law review. In a “hothouse of ambitious people,” her colleague Richard Schragger said, Jackson “stood out for her consideration of others … and her kind words to lots of people.” “She was clearly someone who could talk to anybody and definitely not an ideologue or someone who was pushing a particular agenda,” said Schragger, who teaches at the University of Virginia law school.

Richard C. Schragger

Balance of Power: Threat of Russian Cyber Attacks

University of Virginia Law School Professor Kristen Eichensehr discusses the threat of Russian cyber attacks. She spoke with Bloomberg's David Westin.

Kristen Eichensehr

Russia as a pariah state

Eric and Eliot discuss Putin’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine, what Eliot heard at the Munich Security Conference and in Poland last week, as well as what the West’s theory of victory should be in the conflict over Ukraine, and how should the U.S. and the West more broadly treat Russia now that it has become a pariah state.

Eric Edelman

Here’s what experts think Biden should say about the U.S. economy and inflation in the State of the Union

And yet Biden can’t be seen as taking a premature victory lap on the economy or COVID despite progress, according to Barbara Perry, an expert on the presidency at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “He has to acknowledge that people are in pain and they’re fearful,” said Perry. “They have fears over COVID, obviously, and inflation, and not so much unemployment, but underemployment, and rising crime.”

Barbara Perry

Russia Invades Ukraine: What Does it Mean?

Todd Sechser heads UVA’s Democratic Statecraft Lab, which addresses the problems posed by the twin challenges of authoritarianism and great power competition. “Democracy is at the heart of this conflict,” said Sechser, the Pamela Feinour Edmonds and Franklin S. Edmonds Jr. Discovery Professor of Politics. “Putin does not recognize the legitimacy of Ukraine’s democratic government, and it appears that regime change is a core objective of the invasion. The rivalry between Russia and the West is not only about power; it is about what form of government will prevail in the 21st century. This war is the clearest illustration of that struggle.”

Todd Sechser

Joe Biden’s ‘Invasion’ Evasion

“In terms of fighting words, it’s about as dramatic as you get,” says Marc Selverstone, an associate professor in presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “You would think that in this circumstance, that's a word that President Biden would have reached for.”

Marc Selverstone