What drew you to the law?

When I was an undergrad, I took a class on constitutional law where we read cases and analyzed them, much like we do in law school. I remember being impressed that, even though they often fundamentally disagreed with each other on some important and politically fraught questions, the Supreme Court justices deciding the cases didn’t just assert their positions and ignore countervailing evidence, like ordinary political actors often do. Instead, they usually worked hard to defend their positions and took each other’s views seriously. Seeing that left a mark on me: we may not always agree on the bottom line, but we should be able to agree on a method or process for engaging with each other where we can make relative evaluations about the merits of competing arguments. Law is one of society’s chief mechanisms for forcing reasoned justification—of elevating reason over will—and I’ve always been inspired by what it can do, when done right, to elevate the discourse.

What do you enjoy most about teaching?

Hearing from former students with updates on their careers. As important as it is, the classroom experience is ultimately a means to an end, which is preparing students to go out and have success in the legal world. When that happens and students send an email or a note to let me know, it’s a tremendously rewarding experience.

What do you hope students gain from your courses?

I hope students come away from my courses with a healthy balance of idealism and realism about the law’s promise and its limits. Students often come to law school with a strong slant toward idealism, thinking that the law is, or at least could be, this perfect system of justice bestowed on us like manna from heaven. They often leave with a strong slant toward realism, thinking that the law is all power and politics. In truth, both idealism and realism are warranted. As a human system, the legal system often falls far short of the high standards we should set for it, and students are best served by a curriculum that doesn’t shy away from looking these flaws in the eye. But students also need to come out of law school with an appreciation for what law can accomplish and with the motivation to go out and make it reality.

What did you do prior to entering academia?

Immediately prior to becoming a professor, I was a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in the Penn Program on Regulation while I finished my dissertation for a PhD. I also took a year away from that position to work as a law clerk for a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where I worked on all sorts of cases, from immigration law to environmental law to antitrust law.

What are you passionate about outside of the law?

It sounds basic, but I love spending time doing anything with my wife and our two dogs, Oliver (named after Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.) and Wolfgang (named after Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart). I also love to golf, and I used to be a scratch golfer. 

What are your research interests?

I’m interested in the institution we call the “administrative state”—the collection of agencies and departments that do much of the work of policymaking for the federal government. While the administrative state has been heavily criticized and is increasingly targeted by courts and politicians, a lot of my work pushes back against these currents and shows both how the administrative state is essential to good, democratic governance and how many of the purported pathologies of the institution are not empirically verifiable. 
 
My interest in administrative governance grows in important ways from my strong interest in climate change and finding ways for law to address this vital environmental and energy challenge. There’s no bigger challenge for humanity than climate change, which one scholar called a “super wicked problem.” Addressing climate change requires major changes to existing legal frameworks governing the electric power grid, emissions control, and more, but it is often difficult to make these changes because the administrative state is increasingly hamstrung by the courts and because political actors lack the will or courage to take these temporarily painful steps. A lot of my research seeks to identify legal and regulatory levers for more meaningful climate action.