I like building stuff and knowing how to build stuff. I study how law and regulation help and hinder the building of beneficial stuff.

I worked in computer science before law school — high-performance networking and low-level protocols, including a stint at Los Alamos. I expected the legal code to work like actual code: precise rules producing deterministic outputs. Feed in the facts, apply the rules, get an answer. Where the rules conflicted, the system had a bug, and courts were the debuggers. I was wrong, and the way in which I was wrong is most of what this book is about.

I am Senior Fellow and Academic Director of the Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, where I came in 2023 to help expand the law and engineering program. Before that I was a professor at the University of Nebraska and founding director of its Governance and Technology Center, and before that a trial attorney in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. I also direct the law and economics programs at the International Center for Law & Economics.

My research uses new institutional and transaction cost economics to study regulation in high-technology industries: administrative and regulatory law, antitrust, products liability, and communications. I occasionally teach introductory networks and power systems to utilities regulators, which is its own education in how hard it is to govern a system you cannot see.

Some of the most interesting work today sits at the intersection of engineering, business, and law, and my main interest is getting students the foundations they need to work across all three. This book came out of teaching that at Penn. Most of what is in it was worked out in front of students who pushed back.

Away from the desk I am an amateur woodworker and welder, a rock climber, and a dancer of Argentine tango. I program, without remorse, in C.

JD, University of Chicago  ·  MA Economics, George Mason  ·  BA, St. John's College