Conflict is not a failure of governance. It is the material governance works with.

If conflict-channeling is the stake, rule-binding is the mechanism, and this is what grounds my work: managing conflict through rule design and entrenchment.

1. Digital governance

   Digital governance stands as an emergent frontier where technological change provokes new governance dilemmas and possible institutional solutions. Distributed networks have provided a setting in which to watch digital constitutional orders form and applied opportunities to help design them. They also offer something sovereign constitution-building rarely can: a setting where enforcement is a property of architecture rather than contingent on human-driven political processes.

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   That is the argument of my work on digital constitutionalism. Where a protocol distributes the authority to change itself across independent classes of actors — validators, developers, users, and the businesses built on top — no class can amend unilaterally, and the resulting mutual dependence produces emergent checks and balances that operate like a separation of powers without anyone having written one. I call this dynamic fidelity: the commitments encoded in protocol are credible because they can be observed, and can only change through a transparent process that no single party controls. This is the incompleteness problem given a structural answer. A protocol can no more anticipate every future state than a constitution can, so it has to stay open to amendment; dynamic fidelity is what keeps that openness from collapsing into the discretion of whoever holds the keys. Commitments entrenched this way are more credible than commitments entrenched by concentrated authority, and because protocol governance is architecturally auditable, they are visibly so. Durability and observability make costly commitments more likely to warrant the risk of investment. And the stakes have outgrown economic exchange: as associative, expressive, and politically consequential activity moves onto protocol-coordinated infrastructure, who holds the authority to change that infrastructure becomes a question about rights more broadly.

   The newer turn: artificial intelligence and privacy

   A newer set of questions concerns artificial intelligence and privacy, and my analytical basis in constitutional and institutional design informs it equally. Automation is, among other things, an attempt to close the margin that incompleteness leaves open, and my work asks how far that can go. When enforcement is automated, what is lost, and is it the part we were relying on? My work on adjudication asks which elements of judging are essentially human, and my work on automated penalties explores how existing examples of automated penalty institutions could be applied to contexts where harms result from AI agents with unreachable principals, or emerge from the interaction of many such agents. My work on privacy treats it as a structural constraint on state and platform capacity: opacity, on this account, is a constitutional resource, and its erosion by information technology is a constitutional change even where no text is amended.

   Publications in this area

2. Institutional and organizational theory

   Institutional and organizational theory provides the analytical basis for my other research streams. With Lee Alston, Bernardo Mueller, and Tomas Nonnenmacher, I co-authored Institutional and Organizational Analysis: Concepts and Applications (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which sets out how institutions and organizations emerge, persist, and change, and why the rules that govern politics behave so differently from the rules that govern markets. It remains among my most cited work. It and the Handbook on Institutions and Complexity (Edward Elgar, 2025), which I co-edited with Alston and Mueller, were each endorsed by Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr. The Handbook's premise, and mine, is that institutions and organizations behave as complex adaptive systems: their outcomes emerge from interaction rather than from design alone, and path dependence is an uncomfortable axiom for anyone who hopes to engineer them. It is also where I argue most directly that incomplete foresight in a non-ergodic world makes governance inevitable — that institutional design is necessarily incomplete, and that its incompleteness is precisely what leaves ongoing governance to do.

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   My own contributions in this stream ask how political and economic institutions emerge in the first place, how norms and institutions play distinct and ideally complementary roles in governing complex organizations, what leadership does inside organizations that formal rules cannot, and how constitutional constraints strengthen as exit becomes costly. That last argument, an organizational Coase theorem, is an illustrative analytical nexus between this general conceptual work and everything I do ranging from constitutions to networks.

   Publications in this area

3. Constitutional design and change

   Constitutional design and change is among the most fundamental forms of institutional development, and thus informs many of my other areas of research, even as it remains a central topic of interest in its own right. I have studied the political economy of Ecuador's 2008 constitution, interim constitutions and transitional provisions, measuring textual entrenchment and its long-run correlates, where demand for constitutional decentralization comes from, and why constitutional bargaining is uniquely resistant to Coasean solutions. Constitutions provide the rules about making rules, and so delimit the authorities that will define primary rules for societies and networked orders alike.

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   The constitutional lens is also where my digital work began. My first publication on blockchains, Constitutions and Blockchains: Competitive Governance of Fundamental Rule Sets (2019), treated protocol rules as what they are: fundamental rule sets, subject to amendment, entrenchment, and exit, and therefore to constitutional analysis. Digital Constitutionalism extends that argument to the allocation of authority across an entire network order. And Opacity as Constitutional Capacity carries it back toward the state, asking how privacy technology shifts a balance between citizen and government capacity that every constitution implicitly strikes. In each case the question is the constitutional one: who can change the rules, at what cost, and with what protection for those subject to them.

   Publications in this area

4. The legal and economic history of the American West

   The legal and economic history of the American West provides an extended and critical period of development within which to consider the immediate and persistent effects of institutional choice. It is a rare setting where you can watch order emerge before law arrives and then observe, across a century of records, how law interacted with and shaped, for better and for worse, the development that ensued. Mining camps on the Colorado frontier generated their own claim rules well before any court recognized them, and I have traced how the Supreme Court of Colorado's eventual recognition of that custom shaped subsequent incentives to formalize. Railroad land grants left titling uncertainty in their wake, which depressed the coordinated investment that irrigation development required, a pattern that recurs in Montana, where water rights doctrine took sixty-one years to settle. Related work asks what the Homestead Act did for economic mobility, and how chronic uncertainty in American Indian property rights has constrained development on tribal lands. The animating thread of institutional emergence runs directly into the present: my current work on technology adoption and sovereignty in Indian Country asks what distributed networks could offer jurisdictions whose property and governance authority has been unsettled for a century and a half.

   Publications in this area

• Digital governance
  Digital Constitutionalism: Constraining Authority in Network-Coordinated Digital Orders

  In A Research Agenda for Blockchain and the Law, forthcoming 2026
  SSRN
• Digital governance
  Automated Penalty Institutions and Networked Coordination

  with William Lehr and Bryce Bugge · G.W. Journal of Law & Technology, forthcoming 2026
  SSRN
• Digital governance
  Whom Do You Sue? — Bonded Penalties for AI Agents Beyond the Reach of Civil Liability

  Working paper, 2026
  SSRN
• Digital governance
  The Institutional Privacy Dilemma: Technological Change and the Coevolution of Privacy Institutions

  with Sofía Cossar · working paper
  SSRN
• Constitutional design
  Opacity as Constitutional Capacity: State Legibility and Privacy Technology

  with Federica Carugati · working paper

  Abstract

  We develop a constitutional theory of the relationship between three distinct features of the state-citizen relationship: legibility, defined as what the state can reliably observe and act upon; privacy, defined as the protected sphere within which individuals act outside full state visibility; and opacity, defined as the level of effective non-visibility that obtains in a given society at a given time. We characterize this opacity level as a function of the institutional, technological, and individual forces that determine where on the privacy/legibility continuum a given polity is located. We argue that legibility and privacy are mutually constitutive components of democratic capacity, and that the opacity that emerges from their interaction is peculiarly sensitive to changes in information technology. Earlier step-changes in information capacity moved the opacity balance toward legibility, but at a rate that ordinary institutional correction could absorb. The digital era is different in three respects: legibility is already high, technological shocks to government capacity arrive in compressed succession, and the corrections that would maintain a democratically-representative opacity balance are lagged, partial, and increasingly bypassed by commercial data acquisition and surveillance by executive enforcement authorities. The resulting drift is a constitutional dilemma, in which a democratic state's observed behavior can diverge from the privacy commitments it has formally assumed. Privacy technology has become a corrective on the privacy side of the continuum, because it operates at the speed of adoption rather than the speed of public governance. The opacity balance is therefore a constitutional question because it depends on tradeoffs among competing legitimate governance preferences that only democratic contestation can weigh, and a polity that lets its opacity drift by administrative default has not struck a balance but instead abdicated the choice.

  Draft on request
• Constitutional design
  Constitutions and Blockchains: Competitive Governance of Fundamental Rule Sets

  11 Case Western Reserve Journal of Law, Technology & the Internet 1, 2019
  SSRN
• Digital governance
  Governance as Conflict: Constitution of Shared Values Defining Future Margins of Disagreement

  MIT Computational Law Report, 2022
  Article
• American West
  Development Derailed: Policy Uncertainty and Coordinated Investment

  with Steven Smith · Journal of Law & Economics, 2022
  Journal
• Institutional theory
  Handbook on Institutions and Complexity

  co-edited with Lee Alston and Bernardo Mueller · Edward Elgar, 2025
  Publisher