I am a lefty legal academic and public policy advocate based in Portland, Oregon, where I collaborate with politicians, policymakers, technologists, and movement organizers on
issues pertaining to the future of public money and the macroeconomy.
In previous lives I was an attorney for children, arts and education policy researcher, elementary and high school teacher, and daycare program coordinator.
I am affiliated with various non-profits, including the
Modern Money Network,
Public Money Action, the
MMT Project, and the
FreedomBox Foundation.
By day I am an
Assistant Professor of Law at Willamette University College of Law, where I teach Contracts and Business Associations, as well as seminars on Financial Institutions and Law, Money, & Technology.
In that capacity, I am aligned with the Law & Political Economy (LPE) movement, and consider myself a legal realist in the tradition of Thurman Arnold, Fred Rodell, Abe Fortas, Pauli Murray, and Sadie Alexander.
I am also a musician, and trained mostly as a classical cellist and hornist, although nowadays I find myself playing more piano, guitar, and trumpet, as well as whatever is needed for the occasion.
My pedagogical and political praxis draws inspiration from Lev Vygotsky, Maria Montessori, Zoltán Kodály, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, and Karl Orff, Paul Hindemith's
Gebrauchsmusik, the
Gesamtkunstwerk of Richard Wagner and William Morris, and the artist-activist legacies of Bayard Rustin, Coretta Scott King, Aaron Douglas, Paul Robeson, and Wynne Godley.
I grew up in Newtown, Sydney and became a naturalized American citizen at thirty five, after spending most of my twenties in New York City, with stints in London, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Oakland, Oklahoma City, and Ithaca, NY.
My father was a scientist and then became a lawyer, first working as a federal government bureaucrat, and later practicing as a barrister. My mother was a social worker and now runs a private music teaching studio from our family home. My late aunt and mentor/second mother was the head of music at a k-12 school, in addition to running her own weekend music school, both of which I attended. My younger sister is an obstetrician-gynecologist.
I enjoy chocolate, karaoke, spending time with my dog Bucket, tinkering with my home computer setup, and maintaining a media library for friends and family. I also recently started getting into gardening.
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