WHAT’S NEW
SPRING 2026 EDITION
I am co-organizing and hosting a roundtable and lecture series titled “The Ethics and Economics of Expertise: The University in the AI Age”
Now published: The Past, Present, and Future of Polycentric Legal Order: a Comparative Institutional Analysis of Lex Mercatoria and Blockchain, J. Institutional Economics (2026) DOI: 10.1017/S1744137425100386 (with Ilia Murtazashvili and Ali Palida)
Now published: An Emergent Order Perspective on Governance of Generative AI Review of Austrian Econ. (2025) DOI: 10.1007/s11138-025-00706-1 (with Ilia Murtazashvili and Timothy G. Wood)
The Spring 2026 course syllabus for Copyright Law is now available.
I am a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
RESEARCH AND TEACHING
I study governance, communities, and institutions, with an emphasis on knowledge, information, and data commons.
Recent work includes projects on the organization of global football (soccer, to many); data, algorithms, AI, and security and privacy; and the history of research science. I’ve written about universities; post-industrial urbanism; fair use in copyright law, the arts, and computer networks; modern leadership and management practices; and smart cities. And blockchain.
My research and scholarship were recognized by the University of Pittsburgh in the Spring of 2025 with a Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award (Senior Scholar category).
I teach courses on Copyright Law, Trademark Law, and Leadership, each of which is aimed primarily at helping new lawyers begin to acquire the sensibilities, capabilities, and skills that will they will draw on throughout their careers. My teaching was recognized by the University of Pittsburgh in 2009 with a Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award.
COMMUNITIES
I co-founded the Workshop on Governing Knowledge Commons. I launched a virtual think tank about law-related institutions called Future Law Works. I co-hosted a podcast about the future of all things law-ish and legal, called The Future Law Podcast and now co-host Your Leadership Podcast. In August 2024, I launched a newsletter on Substack, called Everything in Between. At the University of Pittsburgh, I coordinate PASTA, which is the Pitt AI [Artificial Intelligence] Scholar Teacher Alliance, a cross-university conversation talking about the development and uses of Generative AI. I am an affiliate with the Center for Governance and Markets. My work is translated into the Future Law Project at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.
I helped to found and am now Chair of the Board of a Pittsburgh-based “responsible tech” and “responsible AI” nonprofit called PART, which stands for “Partnership to Advance Responsible Technology.” As a pandemic project, in 2020 I created a Pittsburgh Intellectual Property Hall of Fame.
PERSONAL
Continuing a lifetime of playing, coaching, and watching football (soccer), I follow Chelsea FC, FC Bayern Munich, AFC Ajax, and Grasshopper Club Zurich. My family were original season ticket holders of the NASL San Jose Earthquakes. At the old Spartan Stadium, I saw a lot of amazing players and got to meet Krazy George. My autograph collection from that era includes Pele, Beckenbauer, Cruyff, and Eusebio.
I am one of a tiny number of academic researchers working on technology governance, policy, and law with a deep personal acquaintance with the origins of Silicon Valley. I grew up in a quiet suburb that played an outsized role in the history of computing and information technology by virtue of its being home to the Homebrew Computer Club, SRI International, Sand Hill Road, and Meta, nee Facebook. The town also was an important part of the history of US music and culture. My contemporaries have written memoirs about life in the Santa Clara Valley during the 1960s and 1970s; the best of those – for their portrayals of the pre-Silicon Valley Silicon Valley culture – are George Packer’s Blood of the Liberals and Jeff Goodell’s Sunnyvale.