STLR Symposium 2009 -> Commentator Bios

Commentator Bios

W. David Ball is a Research Fellow at the Stanford Center for Criminal Justice. His focus this year has been the ways in which data and operations integration at the state and local level can improve criminal justice outcomes in California. He has programmed and facilitated a year-long series of Executive Sessions with criminal justice practitioners from across the state to analyze various aspects of integrated criminal justice, including the use of Risk-Needs Assessments and inter-agency coordination during a prisoner's first 72 hours of release.

His main scholarly interests within criminal law concern sentencing, corrections, re-entry, and the intersection of mental illness and criminal justice. His most recent article, “Heinous, Atrocious, and Cruel: Apprendi, Indeterminate Sentencing, and the Meaning of Punishment” is forthcoming in the June issue of the Columbia Law Review. Prior to that, his article “Mentally Ill Prisoners in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation: Strategies for improving Treatment and Reducing Recidivism” was the lead article in volume 24 of the Journal of Contemporary Health Law and Policy. He is a graduate of Stanford Law School and a former clerk of the Honorable John T. Noonan, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Prior to law school, he was an improvisational comedian and independent filmmaker in New York City.

Jana Schaich Borg is a graduate student in neuroscience at Stanford University. Schaich Borg's research focuses on the neural basis of moral decision-making and empathy. She has written papers on the role of action, intention, and consequences in moral judgments, as well as the role of disgust in feelings of moral wrongness. Her current work uses both human and non-human models to uncover what in the brain makes us judge something to be morally wrong or morally obligatory. Much of her current work with humans is carried out in psychopathic criminal populations. Schaich Borg graduated in 2002 from Dartmouth College with a self-designed degree in Philosophy of Neuroscience. Before starting her graduate work, she spent four years training in techniques of cognitive neuroscience at Dartmouth College and clinical cognitive neuroscience at Yale University. Schaich Borg began her studies at Stanford in 2006 on a National Science Foundation fellowship.

Teneille Brown is a post-doctoral fellow at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, a fellow at the Center for Law & the Biosciences, and a research fellow with the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project. Her academic work focuses on the intersection of behavior, biology and the law, with particular interest in evidentiary and regulatory issues surrounding genetics and neuroscience.

Prior to joining Stanford, Brown practiced law for two years at Latham & Watkins, LLP in Washington, D.C., where she represented early-stage pharmaceutical and device companies. Brown received her undergraduate degree in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania (BA 2000) with a concentration in bioethics. While at Penn, she wrote an honors thesis on the ethics of elective cosmetic surgery and conducted HIV clinical research. She also conducted research at the Penn Bioethics Center and drafted a bill on genetic testing informed consent. Brown graduated from the University of Michigan law school (JD 2004), focusing on bioethics and medicine and the law. She assisted in the creation of the Pediatric Advocacy Initiative, a legal clinic that offered free services to patients.

Ryan Calo is a residential fellow at the Center for Internet & Society. Prior to joining the law school in 2008, Calo was an associate at Covington & Burling, LLP, where he advised companies on issues of data security, privacy, and telecommunications.

Calo received his JD cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School, where he was a contributing editor to the Michigan Law Review and symposium editor of the Journal of Law Reform, and his BA in Philosophy from Dartmouth College. In 2005-2006, he served as a law clerk to the Honorable R. Guy Cole Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Prior to law school, Calo was an investigator of allegations of police misconduct in New York City.

David Faigman is the John F. Digardi Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco and Director of the UCSF/Hastings Consortium on Law, Science and Health Policy. He received both his M.A. (Psychology) and J.D. from the University of Virginia. Professor Faigman clerked for the Honorable Thomas Reavley, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in Austin, Texas. Professor Faigman writes extensively on the subject of the law’s use of science. His most recent book is Constitutional Fictions: A Unified Theory of Constitutional Facts (Oxford University Press, 2008). He is also the author of Laboratory of Justice: The Supreme Court’s 200-Year Struggle to Integrate Science and the Law (Henry Holt & Co. 2004) and Legal Alchemy: The Use and Misuse of Science in the Law (W.H. Freeman,1999). In addition, Professor Faigman is a co-author of the five volume treatise, Modern Scientific Evidence: The Law and Science of Expert Testimony (with Saks, Sanders & Cheng), published by Thomson-West. The treatise has been cited widely by courts, including several times by the United States Supreme Court.

Professor Faigman was a member of the National Academies of Science panel that investigated the scientific validity of polygraphs and he is a member of the Law and Neuroscience Project supported by the MacArthur Foundation. He regularly serves as a reviewer for an assortment of scientific journals and organizations, including Science, the National Science Foundation, Law and Human Behavior, American Psychologist, Jurimetrics, and Psychology, Public Policy and the Law.

Henry T. "Hank" Greely
A leading expert on the legal, ethical, and social issues surrounding health law and the biosciences, Hank Greely (BA ’74) specializes in the implications of new biomedical technologies, especially those related to genetics, neuroscience, and stem cells. He frequently serves as an advisor on California, national, and international policy issues. He chairs the California Advisory Committee on Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research and is a co-director of the MacArthur Foundation Project on Law and Neuroscience. Active in university leadership, Professor Greely chairs the steering committee for the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics and directs both the law school’s Center for Law and the Biosciences and the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics’ Program in Neuroethics. Professor Greely also serves on the Scientific Leadership Council for the university’s interdisciplinary Bio-X Program.

Before joining the Stanford Law School Faculty in 1985, Professor Greely was a partner at Tuttle & Taylor, served as a staff assistant to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy and as special assistant to the General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Defense. He served as a law clerk to to Justice Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge John Minor Wisdom of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Greely is also a Professor (by courtesy) of Genetics at Stanford.

Dr. Daniel Langleben is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He received his MD degree from the Hebrew University School of Medicine and his postgraduate training Psychiatry, Addiction Psychiatry and Nuclear Medicine, from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, Stanford University School of Medicine and USCF. Dr. Langleben is a clinical psychiatrist and scientist conducting translational brain imaging research on the functional neuroscience and psychopharmacology of addiction and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and associated normal and pathological behavioral and cognitive processes. Dr. Langleben pioneered the application of functional MRI to study and detect deception.

Emily Murphy is a fellow in the Stanford Law School Center for Law and Biosciences and research fellow on the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project based at University of California, Santa Barbara.

Murphy’s current research focuses on issues surrounding the application of neuroscience and neuroimaging technology in criminal and civil law, the effect of neuroimaging evidence on individual concepts of agency, and designing hypothesis-driven neuroimaging work that can directly inform legal or policy-based challenges. Murphy graduated in 2003 from Harvard University and completed her doctoral work in 2007 in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge while on a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. Her doctoral research examined the neural and neurochemical basis of impulsivity and behavioral flexibility.

Erin Murphy is an assistant professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law. Her research focuses on questions related to state power and the use of new technologies in the criminal justice context. Her particular interests include forensic DNA typing, biometric scanning, electronic tracking and fMRI imaging. Her most recent work, “Manufacturing Crime: Process, Pretext and Criminal Justice,” is forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal. Her article “Paradigms of Restraint,” published by the Duke Law Journal, won the AALS Criminal Justice Section award for best paper by a junior scholar. Other representative works include: “The Probability that a ‘Cold Hit’ in a DNA Database Search Results in an Erroneous Attribution,” (with Drs. Yun S. Song, Anand Patil, and Montgomery Slatkin) in the Journal of Forensic Science; “The New Forensics: Criminal Justice, False Certainty and the Second Generation of Scientific Evidence” in the California Law Journal; and “Inferences, Arguments, and Second Generation Forensic Evidence” in the Hastings Law Journal.

Murphy teaches courses related to criminal law, criminal procedure and evidence. She is a graduate of the Harvard Law Review, where she served as notes editor of the Harvard Law Review, and a former clerk of the Honorable Merrick B. Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Prior to joining the Berkeley faculty, she spent five years as an attorney with the Public Defender Service (PDS) for the District of Columbia.

Michael J. Saks’ research focuses on empirical studies of the legal system, especially decision-making; the behavior of the litigation system; and the law’s use of science. Professor Saks is the fourth most-cited law-and-social-science scholar in the U.S., and has authored approximately 200 articles and books. Courses he has taught include criminal law, evidence, law and science, property and torts.

Professor Saks has served as editor of the journals Law & Human Behavior and Jurimetrics. He has been president of the American Psychology-Law Society and chair of the Section on Law and Social Science of the AALS. For a decade he taught in the University of Virginia Law School's LL.M. program for judges, Duke Law School’s “Judging Science” program and at the National Judicial College, and taught law professors at the Georgetown University Law Center, as well as numerous continuing education programs for attorneys, judges, and scientists.

Before joining the College in 2000, Professor Saks was the Edward F. Howrey Professor at the University of Iowa. He was on the staff at the National Center for State Courts. His work has earned numerous awards and been cited in a number of judicial opinions, including by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Brenda Simon joined Stanford Law School in 2008 as the teaching fellow for the Law, Science, and Technology LLM Program, and as a fellow in the Center for Law and Biosciences. Her research focuses on intellectual property, bioethics, and constitutional law.

Before joining Stanford, Simon was an associate at Fenwick & West, where she represented technology clients in intellectual property litigation, counseling and patent prosecution. Her pro bono representation of clients included successful appeals before the Ninth and Federal Circuits. In 2000-2001, she served as a law clerk to Judge Mariana R. Pfaelzer of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

Simon graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with a B.S. in General Chemistry, and she received her J.D., from the University of California at Berkeley (Boalt Hall) in 2000, where she was an executive editor of the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, a teaching assistant for Negotiations, and awarded the Prosser Prize in Intellectual Property.

Gideon Yaffe's scholarly interests include the philosophy of law, particularly criminal law; the history of modern philosophy; free will and personal identity; and the study of intention and the theory of action. He teaches Law, Language and Ethics, as well as Criminal Law, and holds a joint appointment with USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Among other topics, Professor Yaffe has written on mens rea, coercion and indoctrination, and the nature of intention. His recent publications include “‘The Government Beguiled Me’: The Entrapment Defense and the Problem of Private Entrapment” (Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 2005) and “Conditional Intent and Mens Rea” (Legal Theory, 2004). He currently is working on a number of papers concerned with attempted crimes.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University who received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University, Professor Yaffe lectured at the University of California at San Diego prior to joining the USC faculty in 1999. He teaches courses on a variety of topics in the history of philosophy, the philosophy of law, and the philosophy of action.