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 gives me access, and increasing urgency. Distributed networks are the first setting in which I can watch a constitutional order form at observable speed and, unusually for a scholar of constitutions, help design one. 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 protocol keeps faith with its commitments because it can change, but only through a process no single party controls. 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 together are what make a commitment worth coordinating around. 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.

   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. 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 asks what becomes of an institution when its sanctions execute without discretion or excuse. My work on privacy treats it not as an individual preference but 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 supplies the framework the rest of the work runs on. 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.

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   My own contributions in this stream ask how political and economic institutions emerge in the first place, why organizational success and organizational survival come apart in polycentric systems, 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 the hinge between this general work and everything I do on constitutions and networks.

   Publications in this area

3. Constitutional design and change

   Constitutional design and change is where the mechanism shows most plainly. I have worked on the political economy of Ecuador's 2008 constitution, on interim constitutions and transitional provisions, on measuring textual entrenchment and its long-run correlates, on where demand for constitutional decentralization comes from, and on why constitutional bargaining is uniquely resistant to Coasean solutions. Constitutions are the clearest case of the general phenomenon: rules that do not resolve disagreement but define the margins along which future disagreement will be conducted.

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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 gives me outcomes. 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 custom formalizing through the Colorado Supreme Court; titling uncertainty in railroad land grants and its consequences for irrigation investment; sixty-one years of doctrinal development in Montana water law; the mobility effects of the Homestead Act; the chronic uncertainty attached to American Indian property rights. These are case studies in institutional emergence with considerable evidence already in the archive. That last thread 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

  Introduces dynamic fidelity: the protocol keeps faith with its commitments because it can change, but only through a process no single party controls.
  SSRN
• Digital governance
  Automated Penalty Institutions and Networked Coordination

  G.W. Journal of Law & Technology, forthcoming 2026
• Digital governance
  Whom do You Sue? Bonded Penalties for AI Agents

  Working paper
• 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
• 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

• 2027
  Emerging Technologies and Sovereignty in Indian Country: The Case of Blockchain Networks

  with Adam Crepelle and Ilia Murtazashvili · Marquette Law Review, forthcoming
• 2027
  Adaptive Legal Infrastructures for Global Digital Economies

  with May Hen and Andrew P. Morriss · Florida State University Business Review, forthcoming
• 2026
  Digital Constitutionalism: Constraining Authority in Network-Coordinated Digital Orders

  in A Research Agenda for Blockchain and the Law (P. de Filippi et al. eds.), forthcoming
  SSRN
• 2026
  Automated Penalty Institutions and Networked Coordination

  with coauthors · G.W. Journal of Law & Technology, forthcoming
• 2026
  Private Ordering as the Foundation for Frontier Law

  Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice
• 2026
  Constitutional Change: Introduction to the Special Issue

  with Justin T. Callais · 207 Public Choice 3
• 2025
  Handbook on Institutions and Complexity

  co-edited with Lee Alston and Bernardo Mueller · Edward Elgar
  Publisher
• 2025
  Political and Economic Institutional Emergence

  in Handbook on Institutions and Complexity
  Publisher
• 2025
  On the Complexity of the Link Between Institutions and Complexity: An Introduction

  with coauthors · in Handbook on Institutions and Complexity
  Publisher
• 2025
  Towards a Complex Theory of Institutional Analysis

  with coauthors · in Handbook on Institutions and Complexity
  Publisher
• 2024
  Norms, Institutions and Digital Veils of Uncertainty: Do Network Protocols Need Trust Anyway?

  Regulation & Governance
  Journal
• 2024
  When Digital Carnival? Distributed Control of the Metaverse Asset Layer to Enable Creative Digital Expression to Flourish

  in Defining Web3: A Guide to the New Cultural Economy (Q. DuPont et al. eds.)
• 2023
  Digital Currency Industry Self-Regulation: Not All Consensus is Automatic

  27 Virginia Journal of Law & Technology
  SSRN
• 2023
  State Trust Lands and Natural Resource Use in the US Northwest

  with Steven Smith · 2 Journal of Historical Political Economy 4
  Journal
• 2023
  The New Institutional Economics and Cliometrics

  with coauthors · in Handbook of Cliometrics, 3d ed.
• 2022
  Governance as Conflict: Constitution of Shared Values Defining Future Margins of Disagreement

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

  with Steven Smith · Journal of Law & Economics
  Journal
• 2022
  Blockchain Networks as Constitutional and Competitive Polycentric Orders

  with coauthors · Journal of Institutional Economics
  SSRN
• 2022
  Blockchain and the Law: Legality, Law-like Characteristics, and Legal Applications

  in Economics of Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies (J. Caton ed.)
  SSRN
• 2021
  Can Permissionless Blockchains Avoid Governance and the Law?

  with coauthors · 2 Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies
  Journal
• 2021
  The Chronic Uncertainty of American Indian Property Rights

  with Adam Crepelle, Wilson Law, and Ilia Murtazashvili · Journal of Institutional Economics
  Journal
• 2020
  Two Steps "Forward", One Step "Back"?: Transformation and Correction in the Implementation of Ecuador's 2008 Constitution

  in From Parchment to Practice (T. Ginsburg & A. Huq eds.), Cambridge
  Publisher
• 2019
  Constitutions and Blockchains: Competitive Governance of Fundamental Rule Sets

  11 Case Western Reserve Journal of Law, Technology & the Internet 1
  SSRN
• 2019
  Presidential Term Limits and the International Community

  with Christina Murray and Micha Wiebusch · in The Politics of Presidential Term Limits (A. Baturo & R. Elgie eds.), Oxford
  Working paper PDF
• 2018
  Muddying the Waters: 61 Years of Doctrinal Uncertainty in Montana Water Law

  with John Stafford · 7 Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Journal
  SSRN
• 2018
  Ecuador's 2008 Constitution: The Political Economy of Securing an Aspirational Social Contract

  3 Constitutional Studies 1
• 2018
  Institutional and Organizational Analysis: Concepts and Applications

  with Lee Alston, Bernardo Mueller, and Tomas Nonnenmacher · Cambridge University Press
  Publisher
• 2017
  Playing for Constitutional Time: Interim Constitutions & Transitional Provisions

  with Tom Ginsburg · in The Timing of Lawmaking (F. Fagan & S. Levmore eds.), Elgar
  Publisher
• WP
  The Institutional Privacy Dilemma: Technological Change and the Coevolution of Privacy Institutions

  with Sofía Cossar · under resubmission, Journal of Institutional Economics · working paper
  SSRN
• WP
  Opacity as Constitutional Capacity: State Legibility and Privacy Technology

  with Federica Carugati · working paper
  Abstract
• WP
  On (Human) Adjudication

  with William Lehr · working paper
• WP
  Whom do You Sue? Bonded Penalties for AI Agents

  working paper
• WP
  Disruptive Secession or Constitutional Adaptation: the Decline of (Hard) Forking on Cryptocurrency Networks

  with Alexei Byerly · working paper
  ICLE
• WP
  Litigating the Ledger: Civil Liability for DAO Controllers

  with Sofía Cossar and Morshed Mannan · working paper
• WP
  Risk Propagation Across Cryptocurrency Networks

  with A. Jafarzadeh · Templeton World Charity Foundation project · working paper
• WP
  Cryptocurrency Exchange Listings and Abnormal Volume

  with J. Moreci · working paper
• WP
  An Organizational Coase Theorem: Constitutional Constraints as Increasing in Exit Costs

  working paper
• WP
  Measuring Constitutional Textual Entrenchment and Associated Long Run Outcomes

  with M.P.R. Correia · working paper
• WP
  Demand for Constitutional Decentralization

  with M.P.R. Correia · working paper
  SSRN
• WP
  Political Transaction Costs: Constitutions as Unique Barriers to Coaseian Bargaining

  working paper
• WP
  Did Improving the Lot Improve the Lots of the People? Evaluating the Economic Mobility from the Homestead Act

  with Steven Smith, Bryan Leonard, and J. Price · NSF project · working paper
• WP
  Ghosted Towns: Commodities and Transportation in Economic Development

  with Bryan Leonard · working paper
• WP
  Leadership within Organizations

  with Lee Alston and Bernardo Mueller · NBER Working Paper 28927 · working paper
• WP
  Police Unions Bargain For More Than Money

  with T. Fegley, B. Jackson-Green, and Ilia Murtazashvili · working paper