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I’m a social psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Michigan Law School. I study the many ways in which the law misunderstands people and people misunderstand the law.

Much of my work seeks to document people’s intuitions about legal concepts such as consent, autonomy, and moral responsibility. It is part of a growing interdisciplinary field known as experimental jurisprudence, which borrows empirical techniques from the social sciences to clarify core concepts in the law.

I study questions like: How do people determine whether someone is acting voluntarily? How do we think about interferences to autonomy, such as coercion, deception, incapacity, manipulation, and “nudging”? Are our legal doctrines defensible in light of empirical insights from the social and cognitive sciences? My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and has been published in the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, Psychological Science, Cognition, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science. In 2024, I became the first law professor to receive the SAGE Early Career Trajectory Award, which recognizes research excellence in the field of social psychology.

Before joining the Michigan Law faculty, I was a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, where I founded the Psychology and Law Studies (PALS) Lab.

I earned a BA from Swarthmore College and a JD/PhD from Yale. Before graduate school, I was a post-bac research fellow at the NIH Bioethics Department in Bethesda, Maryland. My interest in consent stems from my time working alongside philosophers, lawyers, health care professionals, and social scientists to provide ethics consultations at the world's largest research hospital, the NIH Clinical Center. Recently, I answered 5 Qs about my research on consent.