Lawyers, Guns, and Money

[Tim May]

On Tuesday, August 21, 2001, at 04:30 PM, dmolnar wrote:

> Perhaps in evaluating potential programs, it would be helpful to list
> people in the policy + technology area who are worth looking into. Along
> perhaps with which institutions they studied at? I'll start. I regret 
> that
> I'm not familiar with this area, and so I'm sure I'll overlook many
> interesting people. I'm also not sure what to do about people with some
> policy interests who are primarily cryptographers -- do we include Ron
> Rivest because of his work on electronic voting?

Ron Rivest is a good example to make some points about. Suppose Ron were 
to have some kind of connection to a "policy" or "law" program 
(presumably at MIT). Would he be a good guy to study under?

I'll answer. "Only if you favor his politics." Not that he demands 
loyalty, so far as I know, but that he is not particularly Cypherpunkish 
or libertarian. There is no particular reason why a Shamir or an Adleman 
or a Rivest should be useful.

Probably studying under Varian at Berkeley, or Lessig at Stanford, would 
be better. (Though I don't think people study "under" law professors, do 
they? From my contacts at Stanford Law, via some talks I gave to Prof. 
Rader's classes, my impression is that the kids are racing through 
Stanford Law as fast as Daddy's money will take them, the better to get 
the big bucks at the prestigious law firms.)

> L. Jean Camp (currently at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government)
>
> Was a student at CMU with Doug Tygar. Since then, Tygar has moved to
> UC-Berkeley; I don't know if Berkeley has any similar technology + 
> policy
> program.  She has done some work which would be of interest, including
> protocols for anonymous transactions, papers on how to handle law
> enforcement, and "Pricing Security."(Maybe relevant to the recent debate
> over insurance incentives for computer security; I haven't read it yet.)

Hal Varian has done much basic work in things like congestion pricing 
for the Internet. A friend of mine, Robin Hanson, was connected with his 
group for a while. (I think Robin is now at George Mason U. in Northern 
Virginia...another place to look at.)

Robin is an interesting example of this thread in action. After years of 
work as a programmer, and after developing the concept of "futures 
markets" ("I bid $160 that such and such will happen by 2003"), Robin 
decided to try to put his ideas to better use by going back to school. 
He didn't take a night school law school degree, thus allowing him to 
process wills and divorce papers in Outer Nowhere. No, he moved his 
family to Pasadena and spent several years at Caltech getting his Ph.D. 
in something related to game theory, economics, and policy. (Some of the 
people in his group were those who solved the general N-person fair 
slice of a pie problem. Long known to be solved perfectly for one slice, 
via "Alice cuts, Bob chooses," it wasn't obvious how to extend this to N 
slices.)

Robin made some substantial economic sacrifices in giving up several 
years of Silicon Valley income for a load of debt.

>
> Michael Froomkin (U Miami law school)
> http://www.law.tm/
>
> Wrote "Flood Control on the Information Ocean." Among other things. Used
> to show up on cypherpunks once upon a time. I don't see where he went, 
> so
> perhaps it doesn't matter.

Froomkin was fairly active on the list in 1993-96. I visited him when I 
was in the Miami area. We were on some panels together at some CFP 
conferences.

He's been doing a lot of work on ICANN things now.

This is a good example of a point I made in my earlier post: academic 
interests shift, following trends (translation: worth of granting tenure 
for). Clipper and key escrow were very hot topics around 1993-95. Today, 
it's stuff like ICANN and Napster (with Napster fading...).

In a few years, these law professors may be concentrating on 
international whaling laws. (Lessig, in "Code," notes that he was almost 
exclusively focussed on Eastern European constitutional law issues 
following the collapse of the Iron Curtain, as this was where some hot 
issues were. The point being that a person going into "law" (or 
"policy") should only do so because they love the field of law  (or 
policy) itself, not because they have some ideological axe to grind on 
crypto policy.

"Do what you love, the money may follow."


--Tim May