UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Brooke Hubsch started her college career bound for law school and a career in corporate law. As she prepares to finish her doctoral degree at Penn State, she’s now working with law in a way that she never would have imagined as a first-year student.
Hubsch, a third-year doctoral student in communication arts and sciences, is the recipient of the 2026 Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Fellowship in the McCourtney Institute for Democracy. Hubsch will use the fellowship to advance her dissertation, “Unreasonable Opinions: How technocracy undermines public deliberation about Supreme Court decisions.”
The dissertation explores how the public perceives and interacts with U.S. Supreme Court decisions based on coverage of the court and its opinions in major media outlets. Hubsch said she knew she wanted to focus on public perception of news events — something she’d done in her master’s thesis — but wasn’t sure what topic to choose until she saw a news notification about a Supreme Court decision in July 2024 while traveling home from a conference in Europe.
“It became a bit of a full circle moment for me because I had originally thought I wanted to go to law school because I really cared about the law,” Hubsch said. “But when I started to dig into the Supreme Court, I realized what I really cared about wasn’t practicing law but instead I care about what the law is supposed to mean to everyday citizens.”
Before that moment, Hubsch said she had already started to notice distrust in the Supreme Court rising among the public at the same time that news outlets covering it were closing or cutting back coverage. She said she hopes her dissertation will shed light on how the Supreme Court’s insular nature and limited media coverage has led to decreased trust.
“The Supreme Court doesn't have to say in advance what cases it's going to be deciding that day, it doesn't have to answer comments, and, in fact, rarely answers questions from journalists,” Hubsch said, explaining that this lack of transparency contributes to the erosion of the traditional public perception that the Supreme Court is above or separate from politics. "That’s what led me to the dissertation.”
The dissertation also draws on Hubsch’s experience analyzing media coverage of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, for her master’s thesis. She was an undergraduate at Northeastern University at the time of shooting and recalled the disconnect between the response she saw and what she learned about in her high school civics class.
”One of the things that stood out to me when I was watching that coverage of Parkland was how little of it had to do with what the protests were about, which is an approach to gun control," Hubsch said. "Instead, the stories were almost smear campaigns over victims of this shooting. It frustrated me quite a bit, because it seemed so different from what I’d learned that when something like this happens, the community gets together and comes up with a policy.”
Hubsch came to Penn State in 2024 after receiving her master’s degree in rhetoric from the University of Wisconsin. In addition to the Roosevelt Fellowship, she’s received a University Graduate Fellowship, a Research in Democracy Support Grant from the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and the Center for Democratic Deliberation’s Kenneth Burke Prize in Rhetoric.
Her advisers are Mary Stuckey, Sparks Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences, and John Gastil, distinguished professor of communication arts and sciences, of public policy and of political science. In a nomination letter for the Roosevelt Fellowship, Stuckey said Hubsch is one of the top graduate students she’s worked with during the course of her career.
“She is hard-working, she approaches material with a thoughtfulness and generosity that is truly impressive and she is remarkably able to connect disparate bodies of literature to create new ideas while also remaining faithful to the intent of the original authors,” Stuckey wrote.
The Roosevelt fellowship was established by the late Susan Welch, former dean of the College of the Liberal Arts. Named after one of Welch’s personal heroes, the program began as a summer research scholarship in 2017 and transitioned to a yearlong fellowship after a bequest from Welch following her death in 2022.
Welch, who served as dean of the College of the Liberal Arts for nearly three decades, was a distinguished political science scholar and academic leader. She was also a noteworthy philanthropist; during her lifetime, Welch and her husband — the late Alan Booth, former distinguished professor of sociology, of human development and of demography — contributed or pledged nearly $3 million to Penn State and the college.
Donors like Welch and Booth advance the University’s historic land-grant mission to serve and lead. Through philanthropy, alumni and friends are helping students to join the Penn State family and prepare for lifelong success; driving research, outreach and economic development that grow our shared strength and readiness for the future; and increasing the University’s impact for families, patients and communities across the commonwealth and around the world. Learn more by visiting raise.psu.edu.