» Conference Participant Biographies

Douglas AllenDouglas Allen

...grew up in British Columbia, and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 1988. He was an assistant professor at Carleton University in Ottawa before moving to Simon Fraser in 1990, and is now the Burnaby Mountain Professor of Economics. Professor Allen has published over 70 academic articles, along with five books. His latest book, "The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World" (2012), is published by the University of Chicago, and won the Douglass North Prize for best book in institutional economics.


Terry L. AndersonTerry L. Anderson

...has been a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution since 1998 and is currently the John and Jean DeNault Senior Fellow. He is the past president of the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, MT, and a Professor Emeritus at Montana State University where he won many teaching awards during his 25 year career.

Anderson is one of the founders of “free market environmentalism,” the idea of using markets and property rights to solve environmental problems, and in 2015 published the third edition of his co-authored book by that title. He is author or editor of 39 books, including most recently, Unlocking the Wealth of Indian Nations (2016), exploring the institutional underpinnings of American Indian reservation economies.

In addition to publishing in professional journals, Terry Anderson speaks around the world and is often featured in the popular press, including frequent editorials in the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Anderson received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1972 and has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University, Basel University, Clemson University, and Cornell, and a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Canterbury.

Terry is an avid outdoorsman who enjoys fly fishing, hiking, skiing, horseback riding, and archery hunting.


Benjamin BryanBen Bryan

...writes about questions that sit on the boundary between moral and political philosophy, especially questions about rights. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Australasian Journal of Philosophy, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Philosophia, and Social Theory and Practice. During his time at the Center, Ben will be working on two main projects. The first is a series of papers developing and defending Conventionalist Natural Rights Theory—a natural rights theory that can also account for the role that contingent social practices play in shaping our rights and duties. The second is a series of papers about how to morally evaluate new technologies like self-driving cars and aerial drones.


Hannah Carnegy-ArbuthnottHannah Carnegy-Arbuthnott

...serves as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford, working on topics in moral and political philosophy. Her research mainly focuses on theories of property and self-ownership with particular interest in questions about the normative structure of bodily rights in comparison to property rights, and how to understand cases where these two realms overlap. She completed her Ph.D. in philosophy at University College London, under the supervision of Véronique Munoz-Dardé and Jo Wolff.


William EdmundsonWilliam A. Edmundson

...is Regents’ Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University, in Atlanta. He has a Ph.D in philosophy from the University of California-Berkeley and a J.D. from Duke Law School. He has written on animal rights, coercion, political authority and obligation, distributive justice, political equality, punishment, privacy, civility, and other topics. He is the author of John Rawls: Reticent Socialist (2017); An Introduction to Rights (2d ed. 2012; Portuguese ed., 2006); and Three Anarchical Fallacies: An Essay on Political Authority (1998).


Dr. Donna FeirDonna Feir

...(Ph.D., University of British Columbia, Vancouver School of Economics) is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Victoria. She has written on modern and historical Indigenous economies, the legacies of colonialism, and modern Indigenous policy. Her research has been published in leading economics journals and interdisciplinary policy journals.


Harrison FryeHarrison P. Frye

...is currently a lecturer at Princeton University in the Department of Politics. His research interests are in political theory, with a focus on questions surrounding freedom as a political ideal, the justification of market-based inequalities, and the authority of the state. His work has been published or forthcoming in journals such as Politics Philosophy & Economics, Economics and Philosophy, and Law and Philosophy.


Donal KochanDonald Kochan

...is the Parker S. Kennedy Professor in Law and the Associate Dean for Research & Faculty Development at Chapman University Dale E. Fowler School of Law. Professor Kochan writes on property, administrative law, and law & economics. He is a member of the American Law Institute (ALI) and an Adviser to the Restatement of the Law Fourth, Property project. He received his J.D. from Cornell Law School, and his B.A. from Western Michigan University, magna cum laude. He was a law clerk for The Honorable Richard F. Suhrheinrich of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.


Jahel Queralt LangeJahel Queralt Lange

...serves as a Serra Hunter Lecturer in the Department of Law at Pompeu Fabra University. Previously she served as a SNF fellow at the Center for Ethics of the University of Zurich, and a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies Justitia Amplificata at Goethe University in Frankfurt. Her research focuses on distributive justice and human rights theory, particularly, on the status of economic liberties as human rights and their potential to alleviate poverty.


Brian LeonardBryan Leonard

...is an assistant professor of environmental and natural resource economics in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. His research focuses on the evolution and performance of different institutional responses to natural resource and environmental problems, with emphasis on how formal and informal property rights affect coordination and collective action for managing natural resources. Dr. Leonard holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an M.S. in Applied Economics from Montana State University.


Douglas MackayDouglas MacKay

...is an Assistant Professor and Duncan and Rebecca MacRae Fellow in the Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also a Core Faculty Member of the UNC Center for Bioethics and the UNC Philosophy, Politics, & Economics Program. He is currently working on projects concerning the ethics of public policy research, the ethics of immigration policy, distributive justice, and the ethics of welfare policy.


Dan MollerDan Moller

...is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland. He has written widely on topics in moral and political philosophy, and his book on libertarianism is forthcoming with Oxford. His interests lie at the intersection of theoretical and applied ethics, particularly in thinking about how psychology and economics can inform value theory. Recent projects include making sense of anticipated emotions in our decision-making, assessing emotional resilience, and interpreting global poverty in light of economic history. He has also published in ancient philosophy and philosophy of religion. Significant other interests include subwoofers and the siege of Tenochtitlan.


Julian MuellerJulian F. Mueller

...is a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University's Political Theory Project. His research is driven by a simple question: How can we organize the Open Society in such a way that our disagreement about facts and norms works to the benefit of everyone? To tackle this question, his research draws on political philosophy, philosophy of economics and institutional epistemology.

Julian F. Mueller earned an M.A. in Philosophy and Sinology from University of Hamburg in 2011, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from TU Munich in 2015. His dissertation on Polycentric Democracy was awarded two prestigious research prizes.


Benjamin OgdenBenjamin Ogden

...is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at Texas A&M University. His work is in formal theory, with particular interest in its applications to voting and information. His research includes the impact which subjective uncertainty has on coordination and accountability. He analyzes robustness to differing assumptions concerning human behavior that have been noted in the empirical literature. He also works at the intersection of political theory and formal theory, using models to examine political institutions. Ogden holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Boston University, and a B.A. in Government from Colby College. Previously, he served as a Postdoc at ECARES.


Carol RoseCarol M. Rose

...is the Gordon Bradford Tweedy Professor Emeritus of Law and Organization and Professorial Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School. She joined the Law School faculty in 1989. Professor Rose teaches property, land use, environmental law, natural resources law, and intellectual property law. Her publications include Saving the Neighborhood: Racially Restrictive Covenants, Law, and Social Norms (2013), with Richard R.W. Brooks; Perspectives on Property Law (3rd edition), with Robert Ellickson and Bruce Ackerman (2000); and Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory and Rhetoric of Ownership (1994). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Rose received her B.A. from Antioch in 1962, her M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1963, her Ph.D. in History from Cornell in 1969, and her J.D. from the University of Chicago in 1977.


John ThrasherJohn Thrasher

Currently a Lecturer in Philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, John Thrasher will be joining the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University in August 2018.

He specializes in political philosophy, normative ethics, and decision theory with research focusing on the relation of individual practical rationality to social rules as well as the way those rules are organized into systems of norms and institutions. He holds special interest in how recent work in moral psychology and experimental economics can inform our understanding of how to improve our institutions of self-governance.

His work has been published in Nature Communications, The American Journal of Political Science, Philosophical Studies, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Synthese, The Journal of Moral Philosophy, Political Studies, Social Philosophy & Policy, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, The European Journal of Philosophy, The Adam Smith Review, and in several edited volumes.


Carson YoungCarson Young

...is a Ph.D student specializing in business ethics and corporate social responsibility at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Prior to his doctoral studies, he received an M.A. in philosophy from Georgia State University and a B.A. in philosophy and economics from Swarthmore College.