About Us


Lowry Heussler

Lowry Heussler is a lawyer from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Having participated in the RBC as a guest-blogger, she made it official in 2012. Her most important contribution to the field of public policy to date was her 1994 instruction to Mark Kleiman, “Read Ann Landers every day. You need to learn about real people.”

Her essay on the 2009 arrest of Henry Louis Gates went viral and brought about one of her proudest moments, being described as “just another twit along the lines of Sharpton, Jackson, Gates, etc.” (Small Dead Animals Blog). Currently working in the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development, she has been a public housing lawyer, a prosecutor for the Board of Registration in Medicine, a large-firm associate and a small-firm partner.

She serves as a board member for NEADS, Dogs for Deaf and Disabled Americans, a charity that trains service dogs to increase independence for people with disabilities.


Keith Humphreys

Keith Humphreys is a Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University. His research, teaching and writing have focused on addictive disorders, self-help organizations (e.g., breast cancer support groups, Alcoholics Anonymous), evaluation research methods, and public policy related to health care, mental illness, veterans and drugs. He is the author or co-author of numerous books and scholarly articles, and has written for the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and other media outlets.

When he is not in the San Francisco Bay Area, he is usually in London, where he is an ad hoc policy adviser to the national and city government, an honorary professor of psychiatry at Kings College, a senior editorial adviser to the journal Addiction, and a member of The Athenaeum.

When he is not in the San Francisco Bay Area or London, he is usually in Washington D.C., where he serves as a frequent science and policy advisor to federal agencies, and where he has served previously as an appointee to a White House commission and several Secretarial task forces. From July 2009-2010, he served as Senior Policy Advisor at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

When he is not in the San Francisco Bay Area or London or Washington D.C., he is usually in the Middle East, where since 2004 he has volunteered in the international humanitarian effort to rebuild Iraq’s mental health care system. This work has taken him to Turkey, Egypt, Iraq and Jordan to teach and consult with Iraqi health professionals and policy makers.


Mark Kleiman

Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don’t have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don’t have to be carried out.

Books:

Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken, forthcoming from Oxford in July)

When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the “books of the year” by The Economist

Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)

Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)

UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae

markarkleiman-at-gmail.com

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 City 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 generosity with 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 energy, facility siting, information and perceptions in public choice and work environments, and policy design. His current research is focused on transportation biofuels and their effects on global land use, food security, and international trade; regulatory policy in the face of scientific uncertainty; and, after a three-decade hiatus, on NIMBY conflicts afflicting high speed rail right-of-way and nuclear waste disposal sites. 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 has had visiting appointments at Università Bocconi in Milan and the National University of Singapore and teaches 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, the pedagogy course for graduate student instructors, Quantitative Methods, Environmental Policy, and the 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.

Harold Pollack

Harold Pollack is Helen Ross Professor of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. He has served on three expert committees of the National Academies of Science. His recent research appears in such journals as Addiction, Journal of the American Medical Association, and American Journal of Public Health. He writes regularly on HIV prevention, crime and drug policy, health reform, and disability policy for American Prospect, tnr.com, and other news outlets. His essay, “Lessons from an Emergency Room Nightmare” was selected for the collection The Best American Medical Writing, 2009. He recently participated, with zero critical acclaim, in the University of Chicago’s annual Latke-Hamentaschen debate.

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 has just finished a book manuscript on the political theory of David Hume’s History of England, and he is working on a new book on toleration. 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 eight years ago, he had hobbies that included chess, swimming, movies, history, and English and American literature. Now, he is the proud father of a eight-year-old son.

Don Taylor

Don Taylor is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at Duke University, where his teaching and research focuses on health policy, with a focus on Medicare generally, and on hospice and palliative care, specifically. He increasingly works at the intersection of health policy and the federal budget. Past research topics have included health workforce and the economics of smoking. He began blogging in June 2009 and wrote columns on health reform for the Raleigh, (N.C.) News and Observer. He blogged at The Incidental Economist from March 2011 to March 2012. He is the author of a book, Balancing the Budget is a Progressive Priority that will be published by Springer in May 2012.

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.