Research Agenda
My primary research interests lie in the areas of criminal law, evidence, and tort law. Drawing on my doctoral training in philosophy, I apply recent conceptual advances in action theory, epistemology, and philosophy of mind to traditional legal questions about mens rea, culpability, competence, causation, and expert testimony.
One distinctive feature of my research methodology involves approaching the law as a theory of moral responsibility. The law’s approach to mens rea, mistake doctrine, attempt liability, and defenses such as mental illness and duress, collectively constitute a theory of human decision-making. A legal system’s choice of regimes commits it to a certain picture of how human decision-making works, the kinds of psychological capacities involved in human agency, and the degree to which those capacities matter for moral responsibility. By treating law as a theory of responsibility, my work shows how the law can help inform our thinking about the structure of human agency and moral responsibility—and, conversely, how recent advances in the study of human agency and moral responsibility in philosophy and psychology can help us critically evaluate and improve the structure of the law.
I also incorporate cognitive science research into my scholarship and, in addition to my own research projects, I am a member of the Brain Injury Project at the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School, an interdisciplinary research collaboration between Yale Law School and Weil-Cornell Medicine, which seeks to understand the mechanisms of recovery following severe brain injury and to develop new interrelated therapeutic and legal interventions to help aid both patient recovery and maximal integration into society.
Selected Publications
Rethinking the Role of Intentional Wrongdoing in Criminal Law, California Law Review (forthcoming 2025)
It is a foundational assumption of the traditional mens rea hierarchy that the actions of a defendant who causes some harm intentionally ought to be subject to more liability than the actions of defendants who causes the same harm unintentionally through recklessness or negligence. This Article questions the soundness of that assumption. It identifies and articulates an especially important set of ‘avoidance-commitments’ which are manifested in the case of reluctant purposeful agents but absent in the case of callous agents, and which speak in favor of diminished liability for many purposeful agents relative to their reckless or negligent counterparts. In so arguing, the Article highlights how the criminal law’s current mens rea hierarchy, while seemingly ideologically neutral, in fact evinces a commitment on the part of the state toward punishing more severely those who commit purposeful crimes of desperation, while excusing those in positions of wealth or power who commit non-intentional crimes of convenience, while unwilling or unmotivated to seek out or take easily available options to avoid wronging their victims.
Rights, Reasons, and Culpability in Tort Law and Criminal Law, in Rights in Criminal Law (Hirsch & Moser eds.) (forthcoming)
This article considers how a mens rea regime growing out of principles of corrective or restorative justice, taken by many theorists to underly tort law, differs from the kind of mens rea regimes which arise in a system of criminal law grounded in more traditional retributivist, expressivist, or deterrence-based principles. Recent scholarly proposals to import restorative and corrective justice approaches to criminal law are often motivated by the view that, by eschewing punitive punishments, such approaches are less harmful toward defendants. This article argues, in contrast, that a more traditional “offender-centric” criminal law focused on the degree of blameworthiness of the defendant actually affords less culpable defendants more protection than would a victim-centric criminal law, modeled after tort law and grounded in principles of corrective or restorative justice.
Fitting the Model Penal Code Into a Reasons-Responsiveness Account of Subjective Culpability, 131 Yale Law Journal 1346 (2022)
This paper employs recent philosophical work on agency and moral responsibility to critically examine the traditional purpose-knowledge-recklessness-negligence (PKRN) mens rea hierarchy of the Model Penal Code and the degree to which the PKRN mens rea regime comports with our most plausible theories of subjective culpability. It argues that the PKRN mens rea states are far poorer proxies for culpability than many have assumed, with important normative and empirical consequences for the practice and study of substantive American criminal law. In particular, it argues that this divergence can provide a compelling alternative explanation for recent empirical results appearing to call into question juror competence to apply the MPC mens rea regime. These studies have overlooked the possibility that study participants’ culpability reports which ran counter to the PKRN grading scheme, and were thus attributed to cognitive biases or lack of conceptual understanding of jury instructions, might actually be better explained by the hypothesis that those participants are operating with a coherent ‘reasons-responsiveness’ model of culpability leading them to culpability verdicts that run counter to the traditional MPC hierarchy.
Designing an Americans With Abilities Act: Consciousness, Capabilities, and Civil Rights, 63 Boston College Law Review 1729 (2022) (Co-authored)
This Article harnesses medical understanding of the mechanisms of recovery following severe brain injury to develop novel interrelated therapeutic and legal interventions to help aid both patient recovery and maximal integration into society. With a specific focus on individuals with serious brain injuries, this Article provides insight into the shortcomings of the ADA to consistently integrate people with disabilities successfully into society, specifically focusing on lackluster enforcement of the legislation and its failure to incorporate promising new technologies. These limitations of the ADA are made even more clear in light of new philosophical advances in our understanding of rights and capabilities. The article articulates principles for a new piece of legislation that fully incorporates the advanced technology available to individuals with disabilities, while promoting a more positive understanding of advancing rights and capabilities drawn from recent work in feminist philosophy.