Russell Wheeler is a nonresident senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies program. From 1977 until 2005, when he joined Brookings as a guest scholar, he was with the Federal Judicial Center, the federal courts’ research and education agency, serving as deputy director since 1991. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in political science in 1970.
Wheeler is a senior fellow at the Administrative Conference of the United States and at the University of Denver’s Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System. He is a member of the advisory board of Brookings’s Katzmann Initiative.
From 2001 until 2020, he was an adjunct professor at the Washington College of Law, American University. From 2007 until 2012 he was the United States’ representative to the board of directors of the Justice Studies Center of the Americas in Santiago, Chile. He has posted regularly on Brookings’s FixGov blog and published articles in numerous academic journals on judicial selection and education, judges’ extrajudicial activities, judicial independence and accountability, and judicial governance.
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Areas of Expertise
- Courts
- Inter-branch relations
- Judges
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Current Positions
- President, Governance Institute
- Adjunct Professor Washington College of Law, American University
- Public Member, Administrative Conference of the United States
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Past Positions
- Deputy Director, Federal Judicial Center
- Senior Staff Associate, Court Planning Project, National Center for State Courts
- Judicial Fellow and Research Associate, Office of the Administrative Assistant to the Chief Justice, U.S. Supreme Court
- Assistant Professor of Political Science, Texas Tech University
- Board of Editors, Justice System Journal
- President, Board of Directors, Justice Studies Center of the Americas, Santiago, Chile
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Education
- Ph.D., Political Science, University of Chicago, 1970
- M.A., Political Science, University of Chicago, 1968
- B.A., Augustana College, Illinois, 1965