I am the Harold Washington Professor of Law at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, in Chicago, Illinois. I served as dean of this law school previously.  Before coming to Northwestern, I was the Minerva House Drysdale Regents Chair at the University of Texas, Austin School of Law, and also held a research fellowship at Rice University’s Baker Institute of Public Policy.  I have been a chaired professor at the University of San Diego (where I was also dean) and was a tenured professor at the University of California, Berkeley.  In addition to this full-time posts, I have held visiting positions at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, USC, and the University of Virginia.

My research is in the areas of public law and regulation, and have written widely in administrative law, constitutional law (state and federal), statutory interpretation, and property.  I have been a key scholar in the area of law and positive political theory, an interdisciplinary paradigm that looks at the shape and functions of political institutions and their interaction with legal design and doctrine. 

I am the author of a 2024 book, Good Governing: The Police Power in the American States (Cambridge U Press) and am working on another book on regulatory innovation along the frontier. And I have a book-length project in the queue, this one on on how what I call the myths of lawyer exceptionalism impede our ability to solve the access to civil justice crisis. I have authored dozens of articles and book chapters, as collected here, and have many other scholarly projects underway.

I have given a number of endowed lectures at universities in the United States and elsewhere in the world. And I have given over a hundred workshops and conference presentations, principally on the subjects of my research and also, on occasion, about issues in legal education. 

In 2025, I was inducted in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  I am a life member of the American Law Institute, on whose Council I sit, a member of the board of directors of the American Bar Foundation and of the California State University Foundation Board (my alma mater!). I have previously served as the executive director of the Center on Innovation for the American Bar Association and as a member of the ABA’s Commission on the Future of Legal Services. In 2014, I served as the president of the Association of American Law Schools. I have consulted with a number of organizations in the legal and higher education space, including ETS (formerly the Educational Testing Service), Acuity Insights, Aspen Publishing, and with various colleges and universities. 

When I am not in Chicago or elsewhere on the road, I spend time in Bodega Bay (along the Sonoma coast of Northern California) and in Tucson, Arizona – both of which feature on this website (check out the link to “Cool Stuff”). I am a husband, a father, a grandfather, a first-generation college graduate, an environmentalist, an advocate for greater access to civil justice and for improving the use of and access to technology.   

View my CV here.