My experience as a lawyer and policy advocate ranges from challenging state election regulations to progressive urban policy to international human rights. Since 2015, I have provided pro bono legal consulting for efforts to challenge state laws that ban fusion voting—meaning political candidates are barred from accepting the nomination of multiple parties, and appearing on the ballot as the candidate of more than one party. Fusion voting was commonplace through the late 1800s, when the two major parties began to prohibit it, which helped to produce the two-party duopoly that Americans today have come to know and not love. Recently, people have begun to look again to fusion voting as a practical way to build a robust multi-party democracy in the United States.

From 2010 to 2016, I worked at COWS, a national think-and-do tank that develops “high road” policy for U.S. states and cities. I was part of the team at COWS that founded the American Legislative and Issue Campaign Exchange, an online library of model laws for states and cities (later spun off as the State Innovation Exchange). I developed model law drafting projects with law students and law professors, and contributed to the Legislation Law Prof Blog. My work at COWS also involved projects on progressive federalism; the applicability of civil rights laws to state transit policy; on-bill energy efficiency financing; and urban food systems.

Previously, as a human rights lawyer, I worked at Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic on human rights cases brought under the Alien Tort Statute against corporations and state officials. And during a year with Grupo Semillas, a Colombian nonprofit that advocates for food sovereignty, I researched and wrote a report on the impact of genetically-engineered seeds on the rights of indigenous groups in Colombia.