I am a Professor of Law at the University of Toronto, Jackman Faculty of Law. I hold the Chair in Law & Technology (Innovation) and am currently the Associate Dean for the Graduate Programs.
At the most abstract level, my writings focus on how strangers cooperate. Somewhat more specifically, I am interested in law as a social technology—that is, law’s role in greasing the wheels of cooperation in large and diverse societies. More specifically still, my work has focused on the role of public law, the criminal law especially, in stabilizing cooperation in liberal democracies.
My publications tend to fall into three buckets.
Criminal law as public law.
I have written extensively on “criminal law as public law.” What I mean by this is that the basic function of the criminal law is to backstop the coercive power of the state. Consequently, a moral defense of the criminal law turns on its political legitimacy, not what individual people may or may not deserve. (I call this a “fully political” standard of justification.) For an overview, you might consult chapters 1 and 2 of my book, Criminal Law in the Age of the Administrative State (Oxford University Press 2018). There are now many versions of “criminal law as public law”; if you are interested in what sets my version apart, you might be interested in my paper, “Must States Do It Themselves?”
Norms, cooperation, and social order.
My current work focuses on rules—formal legal rules, like “don’t steal,” and informal norms, like “don’t be a jerk”—as a device for encouraging strangers to cooperate. I am currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively entitled The Normal and the Normative, that asks how formal and informal norms interact to produce social order. Two working papers, “Cooperation and the Retributive Sentiments,” and “Law, Trust and Social Order” (with Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg), develop parts of the overall argument. Related work takes up the contrast between spontaneous and induced compliance, the limitations of a planning conception of the rule of law, and why there are content-independent reasons to disobey the law (just not too much).
Rules as a social technology
I think of rules as a workaround for human limitations, meaning that they must prove their worth against other technologies for achieving similar ends. In “The Rule of Law After the Anthropocene,” I generalize a Hartian point—that the value of law depends on facts about what humans are like—to consider whether AI decision systems may improve upon law’s epistemic, practical and coordinative functions. If so, the rule of law may come to matter less to future generations not because it was subverted by authoritarians but because we eventually came up with something better. I have also defended the use of so-called statistical evidence in legal settings, made the case for sentencing by algorithm, and argued that it is possible for the law, even good law, to be too perfectly enforced.