My credentials

Stanford University (1990)

B.A. with honors and with distinction

Major: Political Science

Honors thesis: A comparison of German and US education policy for resident non-citizens

Minor: German studies (focus on historical linguistics)

I studied overseas in 1988-89, taking classes at Stanford’s West Berlin campus, while the city was still divided. I came back to California in time to endure the Loma Prieta earthquake and then had to watch the fall of the Berlin Wall a few weeks later on TV.

I’ve been complaining about this malign timing ever since.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679, John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778): the rhetorical opponents in my master’s thesis on LGBT critiques of their philosophies.

University of Wisconsin-Madison (2000)

M.A. in Political Science

Concentrations: Comparative political science; political theory

MA thesis: A new critique of the classical social contract theorists, examining the probable fate of LGBT individuals in their conceptions of civil society

Berkeley Law School (2008)

J.D. ; Member of the California Law Review and the Berkeley Journal of International Law; Order of the Coif; Winner of the several Juris Awards and Prosser Prizes

TA for First-Year Legal Research and Writing; Guest judge for 1L moot court arguments

I spent a summer researching “The CSI Effect”: how the popular TV procedural has caused juries to dramatically overestimate the accuracy of forensic experts, especially the reliability of DNA analysis conducted under less-than-stellar laboratory conditions.