Wayne State University

The bipartisan Levin Center at Wayne Law School is the nation’s leading authority on legislative oversight at all levels of government. Housed at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit with an office in Washington, D.C., its mission is to promote bipartisan, fact-based oversight and civil discourse as instruments of change. Led by veteran congressional investigators and former federal and state elected officials, the center, through training, scholarship, and convenings, elevates bipartisan fact-finding to interrupt the cycle of polarization that plagues Congress. The center also works with scholars and practitioners from across the U.S. to build oversight as an academic discipline and as a pillar of American democracy.

Since its founding in 2015, the Levin Center at Wayne Law has worked to foster academic interest in congressional and state legislative oversight as a means of deepening understanding of oversight and how legislative fact-finding helps the public separate fact from fiction. The Levin Center has hosted numerous academic conferences and symposia on oversight issues, sponsored and conducted research, supported academic fellowships, given awards for exceptional research, and built an online community of approximately 200 oversight scholars across the country. Now the Levin Center is poised to take a crucial step forward in advancing the field of oversight research by developing a Congressional Oversight Records Database (CORD) to make previously unavailable data on oversight available for public use. The overarching purpose of CORD is to establish a central repository that researchers can use to conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis of oversight-related issues at the national, state, tribal, and international levels. The database will house a range of government documents and curated data, including the Levin Center's own catalogue of over 1,000 congressional oversight reports.

The bipartisan Levin Center at Wayne Law School is the nation’s leading authority on legislative oversight at all levels of government. Housed at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit with an office in Washington, D.C., its mission is to promote bipartisan, fact-based oversight and civil discourse as instruments of change. Led by veteran congressional investigators and former federal and state elected officials, the center, through training, scholarship, and convenings, elevates bipartisan fact-finding to interrupt the cycle of polarization that plagues Congress. The center also works with scholars and practitioners from across the U.S. to build oversight as an academic discipline and as a pillar of American democracy.