My research focuses on legitimacy and accountability in the policymaking process. Much of my work has focused on the crucial role that local governments play as policy innovators in our federalist system, as well as state and federal efforts to constrain such innovation, primarily through preemption. Recently, I have focused on the use of emergency rule to promulgate regulations in response to COVID-19, particularly with respect to "vaccine passports."

I have been a professor at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, since 2005, with tenure since 2010, a full professor since 2014, and the Roscoe C. & Debra H. Nelson Distinguished Faculty Scholar as of 2023. I have also been a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School (2008), Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon (2022), and East China University of Politics and Law in Shanghai (2013).

Before teaching, I clerked for Chief Judge Edward R. Becker of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia and then was a trial attorney in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.