Stephen M. Maurer is a Full Adjunct Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Goldman School Project on Information Technology and Homeland Security ("ITHS"). ITHS serves as a focal point for the School's science, innovation, technology initiatives. Maurer teaches and writes in the fields of homeland security, innovation policy, and the new economy.
From 1982 to 1996, Maurer practiced high technology and intellectual property litigation at leading law firms in Arizona and California. During that time he represented such diverse clients as IBM, Apple, Aerojet General Corporation, and the Navajo Nation.
Maurer has been associated with the Goldman School since 1999. During that time he has written extensively on a variety of topics including database policy, IP theory, antitrust, neglected disease policy, and commercial open source. His research has appeared in numerous journals including Nature, Science, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Economica. Maurer teaches courses on the the New Economy ("Cyberlife,"), Science Policy, and Information Technology.
Maurer's current research interests include self-governance in scientific communities and the impact of copyright law on culture. He currently teaches courses on (a) innovation and (b) homeland security policy.
Maurer holds a B.A.degree from Yale University and a J.D. in law from Harvard University.
Contact
Office 621 Sutardja Dai
About
Areas of Expertise
- Homeland Security
- Innovation
- Intellectual Property, Open Source, and Innovation
- WMD Terrorism
- Biosecurity
- Phramaceutical Innovation
- Database policy
Curriculum Vitae
Other Affiliations
- Information Technology and Homeland Security Project
Research
Working Papers
Picking Up the Pieces: New Directions for Federal Anti-Gerrymandering Law After Rucho
Working Paper (January 2020)
For most of US history, the federal government let states conduct congressional elections with only minimal interference. This changed with Congress’s passage of the Voting Rights Act (1964) and the Supreme Court’s one-man-one-vote (“OMOV”) decision in Carr (1965). Yet even then the Supreme Court stopped short of overruling gerrymandered congressional districts. Fifteen years ago, Justice Kennedy acknowledged that workable approaches still did not exist, but challenged litigants to do better. The Supreme Court’s devastating opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) marks the end of this experiment.The question remains whether some fresh departure can satisfy the Court’s objections.
This paper investigates the leading candidates. The most conservative possibility is to tighten traditional visual criteria like “contiguity” and “compactness” to make them binding. We present detailed numerical arguments showing that such rules would have to be so stringent as to deprive legislators of practically all discretion in drawing lines. This, however, would split communities at random. We argue that this (a) violates OMOV just as a deliberate gerrymander would, and (b) disrupts grassroots networks that voters rely on to educate themselves, making votes less valuable to those who cast them. It follows that OMOV is always improved by replacing random districting with determinate rules that track communities.
Our second candidate implements this strategy. Remarkably, recent social science research shows (a) that education and social pressure across voters play an important role in shaping community opinion, and (b) that the probability of such interactions between voters can be reliably estimated from an inverse square law. We describe a new open source software program that uses these insights to track community and test it against county-level population data from Texas. We show that the resulting maps are visually similar to those produced by legislatures; are fully determinate; efficiently balance OMOV constraints against respect for community; and are robust against manipulation. The chief downside is that some districts are discontinuous, although this is rare and could be mitigated even further. In the meantime, our algorithm provides a valuable safe harbor for States hoping to avoid future court challenges, an attractive model for reform legislation, and a transparent benchmark for exposing gerrymanders to public scrutiny.
The Healing Constitution: Updating the Framers’ Design For a Hyperpolarized Society
Working Paper (March 2019)
The genius of the Framers lay in identifying and systematically planning for the known pathologies of democratic government. That said, most of their evidence was limited to Greek and Roman history. This gave little warning of the disastrous polarization that would destabilize European mass democracies over the next two centuries. This paper asks how the Framers might have extended their design had they understood these dangers.
We start by noting that the well-known “median voter theorem,” which holds that successful American political parties must position themselves near the center, depends on very special assumptions about how public opinion is actually distributed. This implies that American politics can and probably will behave very differently as polarization increases. This paper presents a typology of possible polarizations, and argues from both theory and history that each is associated with its own unique political style. Significantly, only some of these styles favor consensus politics. Others are confrontational, with extremists deliberately sabotaging government to coerce opponents. Recent government shutdowns are an extreme expression of these tactics.
One peculiarity of coercive politics is that it depends at least as much on political passion (“intensity”) as raw vote totals. Asking whether such politics are democratically legitimate necessarily forces us beyond the familiar language of one-man-one-vote (“OMOV”) theories that count all votes equally. This philosophical question also has a practical side. After all, no real government can go on passing laws that increase public anger forever. The paper develops a simple baseline model of intensity-weighted voting and asks how familiar American rules like supermajorities, presidential vetoes, and filibusters have modified OMOV to avoid oppressive outcomes in the past. In doing so, we rely heavily on European historical precedents and ask how these might change in American circumstances.
We argue that coercive politics, while sometimes pathological, is an essential tool for measuring and accommodating voter intensity. It follows that reform should aim less to suppress coercive methods than to make them less costly. We argue that suitably reformed versions of government shutdowns, supermajorities, sunset legislation, regular order, and stiffened rule of law incentives offer the fastest path to restoring cooperative politics.
“Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty”: How Intuitive Insights Shape Legal Reasoning and the Rule of Law
Working Paper (April 2018)
Scientists have long recognized two distinct forms of human thought. “Type 1” reasoning is unconscious, intuitive, and specializes in finding complex patterns. It is typically associated with the aesthetic emotion that John Keats called “beauty.” “Type 2” reasoning is conscious, articulable, and deductive. Scholars usually assume that legal reasoning is entirely Type 2. However, critics from Holmes to Posner have protested that unconscious and intuitive judgments are at least comparably important. This article takes the conjecture seriously by asking what science can add to our understanding of how lawyers and judges interpret legal texts.
This is a good time to take stock. Recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain imaging, and neural network theory have already pushed many humanities scholars to rethink postmodern interpretations that privilege politics and culture over texts. This article argues that a parallel shift is overdue in law and that Type 1 reasoning, which specializes in pattern recognition, provides a natural explanation for how judges choose among competing legal theories. Finally, and most surprisingly, the article documents cognitive psychology evidence showing that Type 1 judgments show significant universality, i.e. that humans who study subjects for long periods often make similar choices without regard to the societies they were born into. This solves a long-standing difficulty in jurisprudence, which often struggles to explain why one legal interpretation should be more convincing than another.
The rest of the article analyzes how Type 1 thinking enters into legal reasoning and outcomes. It begins by reviewing 19th Century theories that claimed a leading role for intuitive reasoning in public policy. It then updates these theories to accommodate the relatively weak statistical correlations that psychologists have documented, arguing that modern court systems amplify these signals in approximately determinate ways. It also explains why advocates should rationally prefer formalist judges to pragmatic ones. Crucially, the existence of universality implies a measure of agreement across all lawyers regardless of personal bias or politics. This common ground gives judges a reliably neutral basis for deciding cases.
The New Self-Governance: A Theoretical Framework
Working Paper: GSPP15-002 (May 2015)
Industry has organized increasingly effective self-governance initiatives since the 1980s. Almost all of these are based on large retailers’ economic leverage over global supply chains. This article documents commonalities in six of the best-studied examples – coffee, dolphin-safe tuna, fisheries, lumber, food processing, and artificial DNA – and offers straightforward economic and political theories to explain them. The theories teach that oligopoly competition can strongly constrain private power so that firms are answerable to a shadow electorate of consumers. Furthermore, rational retailers will find cede significant power to suppliers and NGOs. The arguments generalize traditional claims that free markets constrain private power and suggest an explicit framework for deciding when private politics are legitimate.
The Economics of Memory: How Copyright Decides Which Books Do (and Don’t) Become Classics
Working Paper: GSPP15-001 (April 2015)
Legal scholars usually analyze copyright as an incentive and sometime obstacle to creation. This encourages us to see publishers as middlemen who siphon off rents that would be better spent on authors. By comparison, recent social science research emphasizes that word-of-mouth markets are highly imperfect. This means that many deserving titles will never find readers unless some publisher takes the trouble to market them. But this second view is deeply subversive. After all, the need for publishers – and reward – does not end when a book is published. At least in principle, copyright should last forever.
The trouble with this argument is that it assumes what ought to be proven. How much effort do publishers really invest in finding forgotten titles? And does vigorous marketing attract more readers than high copyright prices deter? This article looks for answers in the history of 20th Century print publishers and today’s Print-on-Demand and eBook markets. We argue that, far from promoting dissemination, copyright frequently operates to suppress works that would otherwise erode the price of new titles. This pathology has gotten dramatically worse in the Age of eBooks. Meanwhile, public domain publishers are facing their own crisis. Mid-20th Century books had large up-front costs. This deterred copyists. By comparison, digital technologies make it easy for copyists to enter the market. This has suppressed profits to the point where many public domain publishers spend little or nothing on forgotten titles.
The article concludes by reviewing possible reforms. Partial solutions include clarifying antitrust law so that firms have more freedom to implement price discrimination; modifying copyright so that consumers can re-sell used eBooks; letting on-line markets limit the number of publishers allowed to post redundant public domain titles on their sites; and strengthening non-commercial institutions for finding, curating, and delivering quality titles to readers.
Last updated on 02/12/2024