2/29/12
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Professor Lauren Cohen Bell |
Randolph-Macon College
Political Science Professor Lauren Cohen Bell’s work is included in a new United States Senate Committee Print.
The U.S. Senate Committee on Rules and Administration has just released a Committee Print—a document created to assist a congressional committee with its legislative or investigatory functions—on the Senate Cloture Rule, which allows the Senate to bring an end to lengthy debate.
This report is an update of a document that was last published in 1985 by the U.S. Senate Committee on Rules and Administration. It is an effort to chronicle the development of the Senate’s cloture rule and to identify significant filibusters that have occurred from the 1st Congress (1789-90) through the end of the 110th Congress in 2010. For the past several years, Bell, the author of
Filibustering in the U.S. Senate (Cambria Press, 2011), has consulted with Dr. Richard Beth at the Congressional Research Service, the report’s principal author.
In describing its methodology, the report notes:
“A chief source of items to be considered for inclusion in the updated chronology was an ongoing compilation maintained by the Congressional Research Service based on the information about cloture action and other proceedings…Also used were published media accounts, and lists of filibusters compiled by Professors Lauren Cohen Bell of Randolph-Macon College and L. Marvin Overby of the University of Missouri.”
Bell’s book is also listed in the Selected Bibliography of the committee print, as is the 2004
Journal of Politics article on Senate filibusters that Bell and Overby wrote.
Bell, who joined the faculty at R-MC in 1999, earned her B.A. from the College of Wooster, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from The Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center at The University of Oklahoma. She served as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow on the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary during the 1997–1998 academic year and was the United States Supreme Court Fellow at the United States Sentencing Commission in Washington, D.C. in 2006–2007. Bell currently serves as associate dean at R-MC.