Welcome to my website! I am an academic fellow in law and political economy at Harvard Law School. I also am a Ph.D. candidate in Government and Social Policy at Harvard University and an affiliated senior researcher at Yale Law School’s Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law.
My dissertation research explores the consequences of structural corporate power for community governance in the United States, as mediated by jurisdictional fragmentation and programmatic devolution to under-resourced local governments. I am particularly interested in theories of local democracy and how law mediates the relationships between race, place, and economic opportunity. I am now working on several projects that consider, respectively, federal regulation in the interjurisdictional market for corporate investment; forms of governance (public and private) in historical company towns; the interaction between residential segregation and fiscal capacity within US metro areas; and the role of courts in the American political economy. Most broadly, I study how the design of domestic political institutions—like our comparatively unique arrangements of fiscal federalism and judicial review—has shaped democratic outcomes in the United States, particularly at the state and local level.
After graduating from Yale Law School in 2017, I was a Skadden Fellow at the National Consumer Law Center; my litigation and advocacy there challenged the unaffordable financial obligations imposed on poor families as a result of their contact with the criminal system, focusing on the commercial bail and prison phone industries. (Related to this work, I’ve also written about how local governments seek to shift the costs of our punishment bureaucracy onto vulnerable residents, including through monetary sanctions and regressive “user-fee” funding models—for example, here and here and here.) Before joining NCLC, I worked for five years in DC on domestic economic policy with a focus on income support programs and fiscal policy—including as an advisor at President Obama’s National Economic Council, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the office of Senator Cory Booker. During the 2022-23 academic year, I was a Fellow in Law and Public Policy in residence at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs.
I grew up in South Carolina (kind of: our military family moved a lot) and graduated from Furman University in 2010. Outside of academia and policy work, I enjoy oil painting, castelvetrano olives, amateur karaoke, budget travel, fantasy basketball, my Chaco sandals, other people’s pets, running (slowly), and making playlists.
A short third-person version of this bio is available here.