Jake S. Truscott

Jake S. Truscott is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2023 with focuses in American Politics (Major) & Formal Theory (Minor). Prior to his appointment at Florida, he held a postdoctoral appointment with the Center for C-SPAN Scholarship and Engagement at Purdue University.

Dr. Truscott's research program focuses on merging conventional studies of judicial politics with emerging computational methods. His principal research interests include examining the American federal judiciary using high-performance computing systems and non-conventional data sources like text and audio. He is particularly interested in applying computational approaches to study the latent and explicit properties of language within the American legal community, with specific projects on judicial ideology as text, Supreme Court confirmation hearing rhetoric, and social media coverage of the Court.

His research has been published in leading journals including The Journal of Law and Courts, Political Research Quarterly, and The Justice System Journal, and has been featured in major media outlets such as The Washington Post, Newsweek, and SCOTUSBlog. Dr. Truscott is the creator of scotustext, a comprehensive R package for working with Supreme Court documents, demonstrating his commitment to methodological innovation and research transparency.

His scholarly contributions reflect a growing trend in political science toward computational approaches to traditional questions of judicial behavior, with particular emphasis on text analysis and high-performance computing applications to understand how language reveals judicial ideology and behavior.