Kevin Cope is a research assistant professor of law at the Law School and faculty affiliate at the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics. Cope’s research focuses on law and economics, international relations and international law. He is especially interested in the law and politics of international institutions, migration, and relationships between domestic institutional structure and international behavior.

Cope's work is published or forthcoming in law reviews such as the Michigan Law Review, American Journal of International Law, Law and Contemporary Problems and Virginia Journal of International Law, and in books published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and others. His short articles have been published in FiveThirtyEight and Slate.

Cope is currently pursuing two primary research initiatives. In a series of papers (co-authored with James D. Morrow), he and his co-author develop a formal model of multilateral treaty-making. Guided by this theory, they develop an empirical model based on negotiating data collected from the archived records of a dozen of the last few decades’ most significant international conventions. Their goal is to use the models to assist negotiators in finding sets of treaty terms that will appeal to a critical mass of key states, thereby improving prospects for effective global cooperation in areas such as trade, disarmament, migration and environmental. A second initiative (with co-author Adam Feldman) develops the first judicial ideology measure covering nearly the entire federal judiciary. The measure is derived from text analysis of tens of thousands of qualitative judicial evaluations from legal experts familiar with judges' decisions. The data will allow researchers to address important questions about judging and judicial behavior that were previously intractable due to data limitations.

Before coming to the Law School, Cope served as a federal judicial clerk for judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the Northern District of Ohio and the Court of Federal Claims. He also practiced government enforcement litigation law in Washington, D.C., with Skadden, Arps, where he handled matters involving treaties, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, immigration law, the World Bank and the U.S. Constitution. In law school, he served as an editor of the Northwestern University Law Review.