Jacob Hale Russell

Associate Professor of Law (with tenure)
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Jacob Russell I teach at Rutgers Law School. My courses include the introductory business law course (Business Organizations), first-year Property, a class on the regulation of capital markets (Securities Regulation), and an introduction to statistics and empirics for lawyers (Understanding Statistics). I also teach a rotating cast of seminars—on the history and politics of the corporation (Modern Capitalism and the Corporation), the rise of populism (Populism and the Law), and limited liability companies (Advanced Business Organizations, co-taught with Vice Chancellor Travis Laster).

Author photo credit: Adam F. Scales, Invisible Lens Photography.

My research asks when and how insights from social sciences can inform legal policy design. I have written skeptically about the use of "nudging" to improve retirement savings decisions, and questioned the way many legal policies interpret individual tastes and preferences. I am interested in intellectual history and am working on a research project about the evolution of ideas about the corporation, including debates over corporate social responsibility and personhood. I have written about changes in societal conceptions of which shareholders need protection and about how ideas about contracts came to influence not-for-profits, enhancing the power and status of donors. I also write about consumer protection and corporate governance. With my colleague Arthur Laby, I edited Fiduciary Obligations in Business, published by Cambridge University Press.

My current project, with my colleague Dennis Patterson, investigates skepticism, elites, and the misuse of expertise in public policy. The project developed out of a course we co-taught on populism in the spring of 2020 and again in 2022, and in a series of articles we wrote about the botched public discourse surrounding our pandemic response. Our book on the topic, Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism will be released by MIT Press on March 4, 2025 (preorder here). In the meantime, you can hear more about our project in a series of interviews and essays we have done since 2020:

Writing and interviews on expertise, populism, and elites:

Podcasts

"The Folly of Following the Science with Jacob Hale Russell" (Follow the Science, Mar. 5, 2022; see also related Bloomberg article, "'Follow the Science' Is a Slogan, Not a Policy"
"The Mask Debacle with Jacob Hale Russell" (Plenary Session with Vinay Prasad, Feb. 18, 2022)
Expertise and Disinformation with Jacob Hale Russell (Plenary Session with Vinay Prasad, Mar 26, 2021; show notes here)
"Skepticism, COVID-19, and Debating Science in the Era of Trade-Offs with Jacob Hale Russell" (Plenary Session with Vinay Prasad, Jan. 27, 2021)

Articles

Post-Truth and the Rhetoric of 'Following the Science'" (Critical Review, Aug. 2023)
"The Mask Debacle: How partisan warfare over mandates became a central feature of the pandemic " (Tablet Magazine, Feb. 16, 2022)
"America's Smug Elite Is Harming Our Kids: The push to decouple skepticism from science turns schoolchildren into victims" (Tablet Magazine, April 19, 2021)
Let's put the straw man of pandemic denial out of his misery (STAT News, Dec. 23, 2020)

I was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal covering arts, culture, food, and cooking, before inexplicably giving up journalism to study securities regulation. I still occasionally write about issues that interest me, such as arguing for expanding the Supreme Court (before it became trendy).

You won't find me on Twitter, but you can always email me. My PGP key follows.