John Pfaff

I am a law professor at Fordham University’s School of Law, where I teach classes on criminal law and sentencing, and also a seminar on how lawyers should think about and use data (because lawyers can’t depose expert witnesses if they don’t understand basic statistics). Before coming to Fordham, I received my JD as well as a PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago. I also clerked for a pretty remarkable judge in DC for a year (and not just remarkable for hiring clerks who disagreed with him ideologically).

My research has focused on trying to understand the causes of mass incarceration, and what it will take to scale back our outsized reliance on prisons. Lately I’ve been particularly interested in the politics of reform prosecutors, at a very micro (like, handful-of-city-blocks micro) level… and increasingly think that that sort of micro level is where all issues of crime and punishment need to be studied.

I had always used Twitter as the place where I publicly work through ideas and share empirical results, since that seems a lot more productive (and, honestly, more fun) than toiling on a paper in relative solitude until it is mostly done. Plus, with some of this stuff–like data on bail reform–results need to get out faster than the academic publishing cycle permits. So with the utter collapse of Twitter, and the lack of any clear successor (BlueSky is certainly promising, but it’s not there yet), I thought it may make sense to turn to something more old-school blog-like instead. And so here I am.