About Me.
I have spent my professional career as a lawyer serving all sides of the federal regulatory process: conducting investigations for Congress, defending the White House from congressional oversight, and representing individuals, nonprofit news organizations and entrepreneurs in federal court to advocate for their interests in regulatory transparency and fairness. Dogmatically committed to the idea of getting a PhD, I earned a doctorate in political science (American politics and empirical methods) from GWU (a full-time program) while running my own organization and then representing the president.
I was a student of political thought in undergraduate and went to law school to further delay figuring out whether I wanted to study politics in a Philosophy department or theory in a Political Science department. Michael Oakeshott's "Rationalism in Politics" was formative in my thinking and his critique of technical knowledge is an apt critique of bureaucratic politics. I don't see my current academic work (doctrinal and empirical) as disconnected to serious philosophical thinking. The political value of legitimacy is a relevant one when talking about the federal administrative state. And political legitimacy is both an epistemological concept ("does the public understand what regulations require of them?") and a normative one ("is it a good thing that Congress's chief motivation for oversight is election-oriented versus policy-oriented?). Our political tradition grounds legitimacy in cognitive acceptance: arbitrary and abusive government power is illegitimate because it is not governed by rationally articulated rules and standards. While advances in neuroscience force a rethinking of modern politics and law given the mind is not a mechanistic apparatus of technical knowledge, my theoretical view is that federal public law is constitutionally fixed by a rationalistic, if not anti-scientific and dogmatic, understanding of legitimacy even if private law principles should evolve consistent with scientific progress. That may be far from ideal, but it is the nature of a system of politics governed by a written constitution.
I was a student of political thought in undergraduate and went to law school to further delay figuring out whether I wanted to study politics in a Philosophy department or theory in a Political Science department. Michael Oakeshott's "Rationalism in Politics" was formative in my thinking and his critique of technical knowledge is an apt critique of bureaucratic politics. I don't see my current academic work (doctrinal and empirical) as disconnected to serious philosophical thinking. The political value of legitimacy is a relevant one when talking about the federal administrative state. And political legitimacy is both an epistemological concept ("does the public understand what regulations require of them?") and a normative one ("is it a good thing that Congress's chief motivation for oversight is election-oriented versus policy-oriented?). Our political tradition grounds legitimacy in cognitive acceptance: arbitrary and abusive government power is illegitimate because it is not governed by rationally articulated rules and standards. While advances in neuroscience force a rethinking of modern politics and law given the mind is not a mechanistic apparatus of technical knowledge, my theoretical view is that federal public law is constitutionally fixed by a rationalistic, if not anti-scientific and dogmatic, understanding of legitimacy even if private law principles should evolve consistent with scientific progress. That may be far from ideal, but it is the nature of a system of politics governed by a written constitution.