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About

I apply the works of philosophers such as Hegel, Kant, Locke, and Mill to topics of current relevance, such as privacy, punishment, property rights, and the right to bear arms. My books include: Punishment: Theory and Practice (University of California), Hegel's Political Philosophy (Princeton), Practices and Principles: Approaches to Ethical and Legal Judgment (Princeton), Balancing Privacy and Free Speech: Unwanted Attention in the Age of Social Media (Routledge), and most recently, Texting, Suicide and the Law: The Case Against Punishing Michelle Carter (Routledge Focus Series).

I teach courses in political theory, law, and ethics, including courses on Punishment, Privacy, the history of political theory, and constitutional law. In addition, I have team-taught courses with professors in chemistry, mathematics, literature, philosophy, history, and anthropology.

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• Ph.D., Political Science, University of California, Berkeley
• M.A., Political Science, University of California, Berkeley
• B.S., Political Science, M.I.T.
• B.S., Management, M.I.T.

Research

I am a political theorist who has written on the topics of punishment, theories of rights and obligations, and privacy, and a good part of my work has a global focus. My book Practices and Principles (Princeton University Press, 1998) addressed whether there are universally valid moral principles that dictate what's right regardless of what the consensus is within a particular society, or whether moral judgments are culturally relative, ultimately dictated by conventions and practices which vary among societies; it links modern debates in political philosophy to earlier debates between Kant and Hegel.

In addition to these theorists my work tends to draw on Locke and Mill, with the goal of bringing their theories to bear on contemporary controversies, such as whether the U.S. criminal justice system should provide for a cultural defense to mitigate the punishment of those from other societies whose practices conflict with our laws, or whether there is a natural right to self-defense that entails a right to bear arms. My book Balancing Privacy and Free Speech: Unwanted Attention in the Age of Social Media (Routledge, 2014) addresses privacy and free speech rights from a global perspective, contrasting approaches in the U.S. with those in the European Union where the European Convention on Human Rights guides member states.