I am an assistant professor at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University.

I am a scholar of law, political economy, and the sociology of knowledge. The first axis of my research is law and political economy. Informed by my background in labor law, and drawing on the tradition that leads from Robert Hale through Duncan Kennedy and up to Katharina Pistor, my work is marked by an attention to how law and other forms of official authority distribute power among subjects, and what consequences those distributions have for social justice and the trajectory of social change. Applying tools developed by Ron Coase, Wesley Hohfeld and Elinor Ostrom, I study the distributional consequences of rules, institutions and regimes in economic contexts ranging from the employment relationship, to the corporation, to financial markets. My approach emphasizes the impact of domestic and international rules and institutions for the least advantaged of the world’s workers and producers.

The second axis lies at the intersection of intellectual history, legal history and the anthropology of knowledge. Drawing from methods informed by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, I trace transformations in contemporary legal thought to concepts, models and arguments drawn from other fields of expertise. My central preoccupation is with the influence of economics on law. I craft qualitative accounts of how knowledge practices move across the boundary between research communities, and how the meaning and significance of concepts warp and mutate in the process.

The third axis draws on actor-network theory to engage with law’s role in constituting economic objects and rationalities. Drawing from foundational contributions by Michel Callon and Timothy Mitchell, and specifically inspired by the work of Annelise Riles and Andrew Lang, I pay attention to the ways that legal discourse helps to stabilize and materialize the categories of lived experience: employees and employers, capital and income, markets and states.