iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 02/10/2026

Procrastinating lecture prep by working on something new 🤫

Abstract text for working paper "Show Your Work (for My Sake and Yours): AI Disclosure as a Transparency Norm in Undergraduate and Graduate Courses" by Matthew Martin. The text reads as follows: "Universities are signing enterprise contracts with generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies faster than instructors can adapt. Most course policies default to one of two positions, a total ban or total silence, and neither prepares students to account for when and how they use these tools. I argue that AI disclosure should be taught as a research-transparency norm, with a documentation burden that scales with the depth of use. I draw on my experience developing AI policies for an undergraduate course on world constitutions and a graduate seminar on qualitative methods. Both courses shared one rule: generative AI may refine thinking but not generate it, and substantive use must be documented. Yet they diverged in the mechanism: undergraduates completed a structured pre-prompt template, and graduate students wrote a journal-style disclosure statement. Semester-long conversations with both groups, including an anonymous undergraduate survey and a graduate seminar discussion, suggest that the norm travels across levels, but the mechanism must be tuned to its students, who are the best source of that tuning. Treating disclosure as a habit to learn lets instructors foster accountability without surveillance, and teaches students how to show their work while professional standards are still evolving."

Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 27/09/2026

Last weekend I drove 460 miles from Columbia, SC to Danville, VA to get this desk for my home office/studio for more than 60% off sticker price. I'd say it was worth it

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 17/08/2026

Office with a window ‼️‼️

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 09/08/2026

I am just now learning that today is International Cat Day, so here are some photos of our three babies (Fancy Pants, Huck, and Yucca) begging for, and then eating, dinner in our new home

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 03/08/2026

HELLO (WEST) COLUMBIA, SC

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 31/07/2026

Huck is NOT a fan of moving

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 27/07/2026

Best book I've read this year so far

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 26/07/2026

Saludos from Orcas Island, WA

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 24/07/2026

On our sunset stroll last night we came across a duck family perched upon a boulder, a safe spot for the young ones to take a nap

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 19/07/2026

Wedding weekend (one year late edition) was a success

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 07/07/2026

Moving to South Carolina in three weeks

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 29/06/2026

Mia, the new family cat, likes to nap with Sadie

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 28/06/2026

Sadie, my family’s dog who I grew up with, is *17* years old

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 18/06/2026

Huck is annoyed about brush time, and Yucca just wants to be involved

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 11/06/2026

I wanna make sure my students get an idea of the real me

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 08/06/2026

With 93% of votes counted, the second round of the Peruvian presidential election is too close to call. Keiko Fujimori (Fuerza Popular, far-right) leads Roberto Sánchez (Juntos por el Perú, left-wing) by less than 15,000 votes. Sánchez has the advantage as votes trickle in from the countryside.

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 05/06/2026

Reading "Doing Good Qualitative Research" (eds. Jennifer Cyr and Sara Wallace Goodman) and got a good chuckle out of this header from the intro

First page of Doing Good Qualitative Research, 1st ed., edited by Jennifer Cyr and Sara Wallace Goodman. The first header reads "Qualitative Research? In This Environment?"

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 04/06/2026

Afternoon cuddles from Fancy Pants

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 28/05/2026

Cliffs of Moher / Inis Oírr, Ireland 🇮🇪

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 23/05/2026

Today I'm at Washington University School of Law mentoring at the 2026 Model Constitutional Convention — prime time for a new generation of constitution nerds.

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 23/05/2026

Rest in peace, Ran Hirschl — a giant of comparative constitutionalism and an extraordinary mentor who I was lucky enough to have on my committee. The screenshot, from my dissertation acknowledgments, says the rest. In memoriam: www.politics.utoronto.ca/news/memoria...

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 15/05/2026

Revised working paper out now 📄 "Constitutional Cherry-Picking: Constructing 'The People' in Participatory Constitution-Making." The earlier version of this paper received a substantial theoretical and methodological overhaul, and I'm very happy with the results. 🔗 mattjmartin.com/research/wor...

Title for Matthew Martin's working paper "Constitutional Cherry-Picking: Constructing 'The People" in Participatory Constitution-Making. The abstract reads as follows: How do drafters leverage public consultation during constitution-making? Research focuses on participation’s downstream effects, sidestepping elite deliberations where the will of ``the people” takes shape. I argue that drafters engage in cherry-picking, selectively invoking consultation inputs and procedures to elevate supportive and discredit contrary evidence. Through this mode of representative claim-making, these elites do not transmit citizen preferences but characterize them to fit their constitutional positions. Using an LLM-assisted pipeline, I classify consultation invocations in plenary transcripts from Chile (2021–22) and Cuba (2018–19), identifying two modes distinguished by interpretive control of the consultation record. In Chile’s contested mode, the supermajority invoked consultation to underwrite reforms while the opposition attacked its design. In Cuba’s concentrated mode, the Drafting Commission invoked consultation to validate decisions already made while dominating the floor. Cherry-picking makes visible what constituent power theory often conceals — that drafters represent a public whose will they partly construct. Keywords include constitution-making, public consultation, representative claim-making, large language models, text annotations, Chile, and Cuba.

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 13/05/2026

Learning about my future congressional representative, Joe Wilson

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 07/05/2026

These reflections from Paul Musgrave are worth a read. This passage in particular hit home. The interpersonal has been and always will be political. Building trust with students — and finding new ways to do so amidst the polycrisis — is no less than fundamental. musgrave.substack.com/p/political-...

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 26/04/2026

Put together a week of readings for my qualitative methods grad course. Very excited (and a little nervous 😬) for these discussions in the fall.

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 23/04/2026

Today is Yucca's 5th Gotcha Day (2021 → 2026)

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 23/04/2026

Working on a rewrite of my last dissertation chapter

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 21/04/2026

A little shoot with Lexi before we throw our wedding party in July, one year into marriage.

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 15/04/2026

Spring cleaning! (brushing our three cats)

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 03/04/2026

Our paper "Expanding Your Vocabulary" has been accepted at @sscratsage.bsky.social! It's a co-authored piece from the Comparative Constitutions Project on the Segments-As-Topic method, combining NLP with domain expertise for topic discovery. Pre-print/tool access: mattjmartin.com/research/art...

First page of "Expanding Your Vocabulary: A Framework for Topic Integration in Texts" by Roy Gardner, Matthew Martin, Ashley Moran, Zachary Elkins, Andrés Cruz, and Guillermo Pérez, affiliated with the University of Texas at Austin, the Comparative Constitutions Project, and PeaceRep at the University of Edinburgh. The page shows the paper's title, author list, and abstract.

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 31/03/2026

First time seeing one of my articles in print — a pretty surreal feeling. Out now in @polityalsberuf.bsky.social.

Cover image of Volume 58, Number 2 of the political science journal "Polity." Shows a colorful mosaic of a person overlooking a city skyline.

Pages 362-363 of Polity, Volume 58, Issue 2, displaying the opening pages of Matthew Martin's article "Deportation by Design: How Political Entrepreneurs Engineered Crime-Based Deportation in the United States."

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 21/03/2026

Support an actual mission of solidarity with Cuba—organized by a friend of mine.

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 18/03/2026

Boy oh boy am I excited to get back into teaching

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 17/03/2026

Yucca wishes you a good afternoon

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 15/03/2026

"End of the dictatorship"

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 15/03/2026

"Freedom for political prisoners"

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 15/03/2026

"Down with the two blockades: liberty, peace, and democracy." — Plaza de la Catedral, Havana, January 4, 2025. Handwritten on a public art piece covered in such messages. In Cuba, the "two blockades" refers to the U.S. embargo and the island's own authoritarian government.

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 24/02/2026

New paper accepted at Comparative Politics! "From Citizen Input to Elite Legitimation" comes from my fieldwork interviews with constitution-makers in Chile and Cuba. You can read the most recent draft here 🔗 mattjmartin.com/research/wor...

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 17/02/2026

How do professional backgrounds influence immigration judges? New WIP w/ Sara Heridia: Former ICE attorneys are more restrictive, former nonprofit imm lawyers more permissive—but both effects fade in prosecutor-heavy courts, where local norms absorb differences. 🔗 mattjmartin.com/research/wor...

When Experience Meets Environment: Professional Backgrounds, Court Composition, and Decision-Making in Immigration Court

Sara Heridia
Matthew Martin

Research on judicial behavior has long recognized that professional backgrounds shape decision-making, but often treats these effects as uniform across institutional contexts. Focusing on U.S. immigration courts, we argue that understanding how professional experience influences judges requires attention to the specificity of prior socialization and the courts where judges currently sit. Analyzing more than 500,000 decisions by 502 immigration judges from 2015–2018, we disaggregate backgrounds by domain and examine how court composition moderates individual effects. Immigration-specific experience matters: former ICE attorneys grant relief at lower rates than other prosecutors; nonprofit immigration defense attorneys grant at higher rates than other defense attorneys. These background effects, however, are conditional on context — they are most pronounced in professionally heterogeneous courts and attenuate in prosecutor-dominated courts, where local norms absorb or suppress prior socialization. Professional background shapes judicial heuristics, but institutional environment determines whether those heuristics distinguish judges from their peers.

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Matt Martin @mattjmartin.com · 05/02/2026

New from the CCP 🚨 Giovanni Sartori told political scientists to take their vocabulary seriously. Now there's a tool for that. sartori.network lets you explore how 10 research teams across law and political science define and connect 2,010 concepts. Test new concepts, and submit your own vocabulary!

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