Teaching Information (click to expand):
Carnegie Mellon Emerging Tech and International Law
  • How do international lawyers perform their jobs in an era of rapidly changing technology? This course explores historical, theoretical, and political aspects of international lawyering, with special focus on national security, emerging technologies, and arms control.

Columbia College Chinese Foreign Policy
  • What are China's goals? How do its leaders make decisions on the world stage? In order to understand China's role in the global order, we must try to understand how it calibrates and conducts its foreign policy. This course surveys what we know about the history, organization, and incentive structure of Beijing's modern foreign relations and grand strategy.

Introduction to Human Rights
  • Much of international law can be explained by mutual self-interest. States make the rules, and the rules tend to reflect their interests. Not so in human rights, however: states apparently gain nothing by guaranteeing the protection of social, economic, and civic rights. Unlike most international law, human rights are about the individual. Why have these rights emerged and upon what moral and legal foundations are they premised? When and why do governments follow these rules, especially authoritarian countries? This course provides and introduction to the law, history, and politics of the human rights regime.

The American Congress
  • Much of the lawmaking that impacts the daily lives of Americans is done in the US Congress, which is totally unique in design from any other legislative institution in the world. Yet Congress has been gridlocked for a decade or more. How does Congress as a collective make decisions? How are laws generated in an era of increasingly bitter partisanship? And how do its members interact with other branches of government and the American public? By understanding how their votes actually translate into policy outcomes, this class seeks to prepare students to be responsible members of civil society.

Columbia Law The Law and Ethics of Emerging Technologies
  • Emerging technologies raise complex issues for courts, companies, citizens, and countries alike. Who decides what is right, wrong, or even legally permissible when new situations arise for which the law is silent? This course presents a series of case studies and interactive simulations, which highlight both proactive and reactive steps that individuals, organizations, and leaders can take to manage technological problems and mitigate social harm.

Columbia SIPA War, Peace, and Strategy (TA)
  • Whether or not one has ever served in the armed forces, we should understand the ramifications of decisions to put servicemembers in harm's way, since although war often seems faraway or remote, only a thin membrane insulates us from its return. Students in civilian institutions of higher learning have few opportunities to study the prosection and ethics of armed conflict, however. Our appraisals of political decisions that sometimes embroil us in wars are similarly nescient: most have never heard of Carl von Clausewitz. This course examines some of the most difficult choices countries ever have to make: civil-military relations (how do societies ensure the people with the guns don't end up dictating policy?) the jurisprudence of war (when, if ever, is organized killing the most moral option?), the nature of power (what makes "strong" national defense, and how can we know without going to war to test it?) and theories of military science (what is the relationship between tactics, operations, strategy, and policy?). It is one of the only courses of its kind offered to students outside the PME environment.

Kent State University Emerging Trends and Issues (Instructor)

Law, Justice, and Society (Instructor)

Legal Perspectives (Instructor)

Homeland Security Policy (Instructor)

Terrorism and Counterterrorism (Instructor)

Restorative Justice (Instructor)

Theories of Crime and Violence (Instructor)

Service Agencies and the Law (Instructor)

Citation Tutorials Citation Style Guide from the Purdue OWL
  • Purdue OWL provides a very friendly and intuitive overview that explains "how to cite sources using MLA eighth edition, including how to format the Works Cited page and in-text citations." If you have any questions about how to properly cite something in MLA, this has all the answers! (I will accept any standard citation format as long as it's consistent, but MLA, APA, and Chicago are among the most common in academic work.)

Citation Managers
  • Do you type out your Works Cited page by hand? If so, I admire your tenacity, but you are wasting your time! Manual typing is a recipe for disaster and is completely unnecessary in 2020. Let computers do the work. Automated citation managers can keep track of everything you need to cite. You will save yourself hundreds of hours over the course of your academic career and ensure that no typos or oversights in your references list will ever land you in trouble. And it will take just minutes to set up and learn. Have I convinced you yet?
  • There are many citation software packages out there to use. I personally recommend Zotero, which comes as a free downloadable client that is extremely easy to use.
  • STEP 1: Download Zotero and install. If you open the client, you'll see that you can enter and organize citations. You can also sync it online with an account, so your citations will never get lost.
  • STEP 2: Download the Zotero Chrome extension, then navigate to any book (e.g. on Amazon or Google Books) or article (journal or news website) you want to cite. Make sure your Zotero application is open in the background. Click the icon to automatically save the info! It's not always 100 percent foolproof, especially on news sites, but you can easily tweak the entry manually whenever needed.
  • STEP 3: When you're finished, export your list of citations in any format you choose. You can export directly to your clipboard, which means you can simply open your document, scroll to the bottom, and paste a perfectly formatted, alphabetized reference list in the Works Cited section.

In-Text Citation Automation
  • STEP 4 (optional): Automating in-text citations too, not just the Works Cited list.
  • If you're really ambitious, need to deal with a lot of equations, want to avoid keeping track of figure/table/graph order, or simply care about beautiful presentation, you may consider using the LaTeX (pronouncd LAH-teck) typesetting system. It requires a little (but not a lot) of simple programming but is easy to learn with a little time investment, and it's totally free. The advantage is that LaTeX will keep track of everything you cite automatically, so no worrying about in-text references not showing up in the Works Cited, mispelled author names, etc. It also guarantees that your references follow whatever your preferred format.
  • In order to get started, you'll want to download a distribution that will compile your documents on the backend along with a client in which you will do your actual writing. If you have have some experience with programming, a basic text editor or source code editor like Sublime or Notepad++ will work too.
  • When you're familiar with the basics of LaTeX, here's a helpful tutorial to use it to gain command over your citations: Bibtex/Biblatex Tutorial. LaTeX can be tricky to learn at first, so just ask if you have questions.

Recommendation Letters I strongly suggest that students first seek out tenured professors to write their letters, since these carry the most weight. Quite understandably, however, not everyone has had the opportunity to develop close working relationships with tenured faculty before graduating. If you plan to ask me for a recommendation letter, you should email me with the following:
  • Application deadline (please give me at least two weeks notice unless I've written for you previously)
  • Your statement of purpose/personal statement/cover letter, or a description of your motivation for applying and immediate objectives
  • Also helpful: transcripts, resume/CV, and anything else you think I should know about your circumstances or aspirations
  • How and to whom I should submit the recommendation

The more you can provide, the better I can try to make your letter. Here are two excellent guides to look at.


Also: if you're a former student, please feel free to get back in touch! I'd love to hear how you're doing.