About Us

Mark Kleiman

Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA School of Public Affairs and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches methods of policy analysis, political philosophy, and drug abuse and crime control policy.

Author:

When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control.

Chairman of BOTEC Analysis Corporation, a Cambridge, Massachusetts firm that conducts policy analysis and contract research on illicit drugs, crime, and health care.

Previous teaching positions:

John F. Kennedy School of Government
University of Rochester
University of Maryland (inaugural Thomas C. Schelling Distinguished
Visiting Professor

Research interests: drug abuse, crime control, methods of policy analysis.

Past positions:

Director of Policy and Management Analysis for the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice

Deputy Director for Management of the Office of Management and Budget for the City of Boston

Special Assistant to Edwin H. Land at Polaroid Corporation

Legislative Assistant to Congressman Les Aspin.

UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Out of Context
Intro to Policy Studies Course
Imperfect Rationality
Drug Abuse Control Policy

Michael O'Hare

Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, Michael O’Hare was raised in New York (and uses the term, correctly, to mean New York County) and trained at Harvard as an architect and structural engineer. Diverted from an honest career designing buildings by the offer of a job in which he could think about anything he wanted to and spend his time with very smart and curious young people, he fell among economists and such like, and continues to benefit from their patience with his demands for continuing on-the-job social science training.

He has followed the process and principles of design into “nonphysical environments” such as production processes in organizations, regulation, and information management and published a variety of research in environmental policy, government policy towards the arts, and management, with special interests in tax policy, facility siting, information and perceptions in public choice and work environments, and policy design. His current research is focused on pricing and revenue models for music and other digital media, and accounting practices in museums. He is also a regular writer on pedagogy, especially teaching in professional education, and co-edited the “Curriculum and Case Notes” section of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Between faculty appointments at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, he was director of policy analysis at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs. He teaches occasionally at Università Bocconi in Milan and the National University of Singapore and regularly in the Goldman School’s executive (mid-career) programs.

At GSPP, O’Hare has taught a studio course in Program and Policy Design, Arts and Cultural Policy, Public Management, Quantitative Methods, Environmental Policy, and the school’s introduction to public policy for its undergraduate minor, which he supervises. Generally, he considers himself the school’s resident expert in any subject in which there is no such thing as real expertise (a recent project concerned the governance and design of California county fairs), but is secure in the distinction of being the only faculty member with a metal lathe in his basement and a 4×5 Ebony view camera. At the moment, he would rather be making something with his hands than writing this blurb.

Andrew Sabl

Andrew Sabl teaches political theory as an associate professor of Public Policy and Political Science at UCLA, and is thus a colleague of the long-suffering Mark A.R. Kleiman. His interests include the history of political thought, toleration, democratic theory, political ethics, and problems of coordination and convention. His first book, Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics combines most of these topics, with predictably disastrous results; he is currently writing a book on the political theory of David Hume’s History of England. He is a native Los Angelino–like Jonathan Zasloff, stipulating that the Valley counts as Los Angeles. He has a B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard. He is married to Miriam Laugesen, also a political scientist but the kind who knows some facts. Until six years ago, he had hobbies that included chess, swimming, movies, history, and English and American literature. Now, he is the proud father of a six-year-old son.

Steven M. Teles

Steven Teles is a Visiting Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of American Politics. He is the author of Whose Welfare? AFDC and Elite Politics (University Press of Kansas), and co-editor of Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy (Cambridge). He is currently completing a book on the evolution of the conservative legal movement, co-editing a book on conservatism and American Political Development, and beginning a project on integrating political analysis into policy analysis. He has also written journal articles and book chapters on international free market think tanks, normative issues in policy analysis, pensions and affirmative action policy in Britain, US-China policy and federalism. He has taught at Brandeis, Boston University, Holy Cross, and Hamilton colleges, and been a research fellow at Harvard, Princeton and the University of London.

James Wimberley

James Wimberley (59, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, where his main achievements were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He recently retired with his wife Patricia to a little white house in Andalucia, tightly supervised by two young cats, and has started to write to make up lost time afterto many unread memos. From this sunny expatriate bubble he contemplates the world with the detachment of a medio langostino, except for the question whether the Spanish property boom will collapse before or after the water runs out.

I suppose I’ve been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I’m quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I’m open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia.

James Wimberley’s publications on the web

Jonathan Zasloff

Jonathan Zasloff teaches Torts, Land Use, Environmental Law, Comparative Urban Planning Law, Legal History, and Public Policy Clinic – Land Use, the Environment and Local Government. He grew up and still lives in the San Fernando Valley, about which he remains immensely proud (to the mystification of his friends and colleagues). After graduating from Yale Law School, and while clerking for a federal appeals court judge in Boston, he decided to return to Los Angeles shortly after the January 1994 Northridge earthquake, reasoning that he would gladly risk tremors in order to avoid the average New England wind chill temperature of negative 55 degrees.

Professor Zasloff has a keen interest in world politics; he holds a PhD in the history of American foreign policy from Harvard and an M.Phil. in International Relations from Cambridge University. Much of his recent work concerns the influence of lawyers and legalism in US external relations, and has published articles on these subjects in the New York University Law Review and the Yale Law Journal. More generally, his recent interests focus on the response of public institutions to social problems, and the role of ideology in framing policy responses.

Professor Zasloff has long been active in state and local politics and policy. He recently co-authored an article discussing the relationship of Proposition 13 (California’s landmark tax limitation initiative) and school finance reform, and served for several years as a senior policy advisor to the Speaker of California Assembly. His practice background reflects these interests: for two years, he represented welfare recipients attempting to obtain child care benefits and microbusinesses in low income areas. He then practiced for two more years at one of Los Angeles’ leading public interest environmental and land use firms, challenging poorly planned development and working to expand the network of the city’s urban park system. He currently serves as a member of the boards of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy (a state agency charged with purchasing and protecting open space), the Los Angeles Center for Law and Justice (the leading legal service firm for low-income clients in east Los Angeles), and Friends of Israel’s Environment. Professor Zasloff’s other major activity consists in explaining the Triangle Offense to his very patient wife, Kathy.