Current Faculty Fellows and Research Affiliates

Paul Brest

Law

Stanford University

Paul Brest is former dean and professor emeritus (active) at Stanford Law School, a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, faculty director of the Effective Philanthropy Learning Initiative at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and co-director of the Stanford Law and Policy Lab. He was president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation from 2000 to 2012.

He is co-author of Money Well Spent: A Strategic Guide to Smart Philanthropy (Stanford University Press, 2018, 2nd ed.), Problem Solving, Decision Making, and Professional Judgment (Oxford University Press, 2010), and articles on constitutional law, philanthropy, and impact investing. His current courses include Problem Solving for Public Policy and Social Change and Advanced Topics in Philanthropy and Impact Investing. He created the online interactive course, Essentials of Nonprofit Strategy, on Stanford’s Lagunita platform and is the instructor in an online course, Essentials of Nonprofit Strategy, offered by Philanthropy University.

Brest is a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary degrees from Northwestern University School of Law and Swarthmore College. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1969, he clerked for Judge Bailey Aldrich of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and Justice John M. Harlan of the U.S. Supreme Court, and did civil rights litigation with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in Mississippi. He was a fellow in 1983-84, and has been a faculty fellow since 2018-19.

Estelle Freedman

History

Stanford University

Estelle Freedman’s current research project expands upon the legal approach in her book Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Harvard University Press, 2013), by exploring digitized oral history collections as sources for understanding personal narratives of assault, rape, and harassment in the twentieth-century U.S. She is working on methodological and historical essays interpreting sexual memories, sexual silences, and the changing language of sexual trauma across diverse groups of narrators.

Freedman’s past scholarship has focused on the histories of women, sexuality, feminism, and social movements. In addition to two books on the history of women’s prison reform in the U.S., she is the author of No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (Ballantine Books, 2002) and the co-author (with John D'Emilio) of Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (3rd edition, University of Chicago Press, 2012), and the editor of The Essential Feminist Reader (Modern Library, 2007). She earned her BA at Barnard College, and MA and PhD degrees in U.S. History at Columbia University.

Freedman holds the Edgar E. Robinson chair (Emerit) in U.S. History at Stanford, where she co-founded the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She has been a CASBS faculty fellow since 2019-20, participating as a member in the CASBS project “Addressing Sexual Violence Through Institutional Courage,” and was a fellow at CASBS in 2009-10 and 2018-19.

For more information, you can find her CV at https://cap.stanford.edu/profiles/viewCV?facultyId=55788&name=Estelle_Freedman

Steven Goodman

Medicine

Stanford University

Steven Goodman, MD, MHS, PhD, is associate dean for clinical and translational research and professor of epidemiology & population health and of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He directs the Stanford Program on Research Rigor and Reproducibility (SPORR), a program to teach and incentivize the adoption of best scientific practices throughout the Stanford School of Medicine. He is co-founder and co-director of the Meta-research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), a group dedicated to studying and improving the reproducibility and efficiency of biomedical research. He also leads a variety of training programs in epidemiology and clinical research. His research area is in scientific and statistical inference, medical epistemology and their connections with research ethics and policy.

Outside of Stanford, Goodman serves as chair of the PCORI Methodology Committee, senior statistical editor at the Annals of Internal Medicine, and is scientific advisor to the national Blue Cross-Blue Shield technology assessment program. He has participated in over a dozen committees and workshops of the National Academies of Science. He was awarded the 2016 Spinoza Chair in Medicine from the University of Amsterdam for his work in inference, the 2019 Lilienfeld award from the American College of Epidemiology for his lifetime contributions to the field of epidemiology, and in 2020 was elected to the National Academy of Medicine. He studied mathematics and biochemistry at Harvard, received his MD from NYU, trained in pediatrics at Washington University in St. Louis, and received a masters in biostatistics and PhD in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Goodman has been a faculty fellow since 2021-22.  In his non-academic life, Steve is a singer, of opera, national anthems and political satire, and a tennis player (4.0). He welcomes connecting with CASBS fellows in relation to any of those pursuits.

For more about him, visit https://profiles.stanford.edu/steven-goodman.

David B. Grusky

Sociology

Stanford University

David Grusky’s research addresses the changing structure of late-industrial inequality and takes on such topics as the role of market failure in explaining income inequality, recent trends in economic and social mobility, the surprising persistence of extreme gender inequality, and new ways to improve the country’s infrastructure for monitoring poverty, inequality, and mobility.
At Stanford University, Grusky is the Edward Ames Edmonds Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, professor of sociology, senior fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, faculty fellow of the Center for Population Health Sciences, director of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, and coeditor of Pathways Magazine. Grusky is a former CASBS fellow (class of 1991-92) and has been a faculty fellow since 2017-18.

Daniel Ho

Law

Stanford University

Daniel E. Ho is the William Benjamin Scott and Luna M. Scott Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, professor of political science, and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He is also associate director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and director of the Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (RegLab). Ho serves on the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Commission (NAIAC), advising the White House on artificial intelligence, and as a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS). He received his JD from Yale Law School and PhD from Harvard University and clerked for Judge Stephen F. Williams on the U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit. Ho has been a faculty fellow at CASBS since 2017-18.

James Holland Jones

Anthropology

Stanford University

James Holland Jones is an associate professor of Earth System Science and a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Originally trained as an anthropologist, he has additional training and expertise in demography, statistics, and epidemiology. Jones works on a variety of projects relating to human adaptability and decision-making, including the analysis of livelihood-related responses to climate change, the role of dynamic exchange networks in managing environmental risks among subsistence populations, the reconstruction of prehistoric demographic patterns and how these inform debates about climate-mediated collapse, the coupled dynamics of behavior-change and disease transmission, and the impact of structural racism on epidemic outcomes.

Jones also has a broad interest in the intersection of evolutionary and economic theory, which served as the foundation for his CASBS fellowship in 2015-16. Having taken a hiatus on the book project to work on more basic science on the subject, he is back to working on The Most Rational People in the World.

He teaches classes, both within Stanford Earth and for Human Biology, such as "Global Change and Emerging Infectious Disease," "Biological and Social Networks," "Demography and Life History Theory," and "Adaptation." He also teaches a freshman seminar that goes by the same name as his book project, "The Most Rational People in the World." This winter, he will co-teach one of the inaugural classes in the Doerr School of Sustainability called "Imagining Adaptive Futures," which will examine how speculative fiction can help us work toward sustainable and just futures, even in the face of potentially existential environmental threats. Along with his wife, Libra Hilde (CASBS class of 2017-18), he is a resident fellow at Castaño House.

Jones is the co-leader of a new CASBS program entitled Human, Nature, and Machines. He hopes to bring not only his interest in evolving coupled-socio-ecological systems but his obsession with CliFi to this task (https://theinterval.org/salon-talks/02019/jan/29/science-climate-fiction-jones-clifi).

For more information, please find his website at: https://heeh.stanford.edu

Margaret Levi

Political Science

Stanford University

Margaret Levi is professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow of the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. She is a faculty fellow and former Sara Miller McCune Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), co-director of the Stanford Ethics, Society, and Technology Hub, and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University. She is the winner of the 2019 Johan Skytte Prize and the 2020 Falling Walls Breakthrough award.  She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and served as president of the American Political Science Association. Recent books include In the Interest of Others (Princeton University Press, 2013), coauthored with John Ahlquist, and A Moral Political Economy: Present, Past, Future (Cambridge University Press, 2021), coauthored with Federica Carugati. She writes about what makes for trustworthy governance and what evokes citizen compliance, consent, and dissent.

As a faculty fellow, Levi will continue to co-lead the New Moral Political Economy program with CASBS program director Zachary Ugolnik. Among its spin-offs she helps manage are the Social Science of Caregiving with Alison Gopnik and the enCOREage project, whose leadership team also includes Simon Halliday (CASBS fellow 2022-23), Wendy Carlin, Roby Harrington, and Samuel Bowles. She is co-leader with Michael Bernstein, David Magnus, and Debra Satz of the Ethics and Society Review project. Levi was a fellow at CASBS in 1993-94.

Nate Persily

Law

Stanford University

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science, Communication, and FSI.  Prior to joining Stanford, Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.  He also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as a Guggenheim Fellow, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a 2017-18 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration.  He is codirector of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Stanford Program on Democracy and the Internet, and the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which supported local election officials in taking the necessary steps during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide safe voting options for the 2020 election. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a commissioner on the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.  He received a BA and MA in political science from Yale (1992); a JD from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a PhD in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.

Persily is a faculty fellow in 2022-23. His website is www.persily.com and Twitter handle is @persily

Debra Satz

Philosophy

Stanford University

Debra Satz, the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society, is the dean of the Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. She earned a bachelor’s degree from City College of New York and a doctorate in philosophy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on the ethical limits of markets; the place of equality in a just society; ethics, economics and public policy, particularly questions around education. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2004, Satz received the Walter J. Gores Award, Stanford’s highest teaching honor. She was awarded the Roland Prize in 2010 for faculty volunteer service. She also co-founded the Hope House Scholars Program, which pairs volunteer faculty with undergraduates to teach liberal arts courses to residents of a drug and alcohol treatment facility for women.

Her books include Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets (Oxford University Press, 2010); and Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy (with Dan Hausman and Michael McPherson, Cambridge University Press, 2017), as well as several edited volumes. Her papers have been published in the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Ethics, The World Bank Economic Review, and Ambio, among other journals.

Satz is a faculty fellow and member of the “Creating a New Moral Political Economy” project.  She was a fellow at CASBS in 2017-18.

Allison Stanger

Political Science

Middlebury College

As a research affiliate at CASBS, Allison Stanger will be working on a book tentatively titled Who Elected Big Tech? She will also co-lead (with James Guszcza) the Theory of AI Practice Initiative. A general theme in her work is the impact of technological innovation on democracy’s sustainability and the blinders that our existing theoretical paradigms for thinking about global markets and national governance may have imposed on what we see and value. She is also interested in the role of free expression in both anti-racist liberal education and democratic accountability.

Stanger is the Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, and an external professor and member of the Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump (Yale University Press, 2019) and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 2009). She is the co-editor (with W. Brian Arthur and Eric Beinhocker) of Complexity Economics (SFI Press, 2020). Stanger’s writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post, and she has testified (at the invitation of both Democrats and Republicans) before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, the Senate Budget Committee, the Congressional Oversight Panel, the Senate HELP Committee, and the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform. She received her PhD in political science from Harvard University, where she spent academic year 2019-20 as technology and human values senior fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. She was a co-author of the center’s Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience and is a senior advisor to the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network. Stanger was the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress and a CASBS fellow in 2020-21.