Mark Fenster is UF Research Foundation Professor at the Frederic Levin School of Law, University of Florida. His law degree is from Yale, and he received a PhD in communications and cultural studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His legal scholarship has focused on three areas: bureaucracy, governance, and the problem of information disclosure and transparency; the intellectual history of legal realism, focusing on the work of Thurman Arnold; and the relationship between formal constitutional conceptions of property rights, as defined by the Supreme Court, and local regulatory institutions and practices. Common to all three areas is the distance between formal, normative conceptions of law (the laissez faire notion of the "rugged individual" that fascinated Arnold; the conflicted, impossible, and largely meaningless normative conception of "transparency"; the Fifth Amendment's protection of "property") and law's actual meanings in practice. He is also the author of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (revised edition 2008, University of Minnesota Press), a leading work on the cultural politics of conspiracy theory since its first edition in 1999.