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Ph.D. James and Patricia Kowal Professor of Law at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

Robert J. MacCoun

James and Patricia Kowal Professor of Law at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

Dr. MacCoun is the James and Patricia Kowal Professor of Law, a Professor by courtesy in Psychology, and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. Trained as a social psychologist, he has published numerous studies on illicit drug use, drug policy, judgment and decision-making, citizens’ assessments of fairness in the courts, social influence processes, and bias in the use and interpretation of research evidence by scientists, journalists and citizens. His publications include “Hide Results to Seek the Truth” (with physicist Saul Perlmutter, in Nature, 2015), as well as articles in Science (1989, 1997, and 2017), the New England Journal of Medicine (2015), and Psychological Review (1996 and 2012). MacCoun’s book with Peter Reuter,"Drug War Heresies" (Cambridge, 2001) is considered a landmark scholarly analysis of the drug legalization debate. Prior to joining the Stanford Law School in 2014, Dr. MacCoun was a behavioral scientist for the RAND Corporation (1986-1993), and a professor of law and public policy at UC Berkeley (1993-2014).