Those who can, do; they should also teach.

After eight years as a trial and appellate lawyer, David came to Stanford Law School to pursue an advanced degree in Law, Science & Technology. His research and writing, motivated by Nobel Laureate Stephen Schneider’s early advocacy for interdisciplinary work, ranged from energy and environment, to technology and intellectual property, to design and cognition. David’s thesis, Object-Modeling and Fuzzy Sets as Design Schema for Law and Policy, proposed the idea that, having already proven their utility in physical (computing) systems, these design methods should port neatly over to certain non-physical (social) systems. He received his JSM from Stanford in 2007.

David began his commitment to teaching at SLS while writing his thesis, as an instructor for the Advocacy Workshop, and thereafter in Trial Advocacy and Applied Evidence. In 2006 he was invited to become a Lecturer-in-Law, teaching the 4-credit course, Negotiation, in conjunction with his full-time law practice in Silicon Valley.  After nine instances of that course, he now teaches Advanced Negotiation – Transactions every spring term, for SLS, GSB, MS&E and other graduate students. In 2014, David independently produced a 5-week online course, Introduction to Negotiation, delivered on the NovoED social learning platform. This MOOC was specifically designed for students around the world seeking their first exposure to the fundamentals of both transactional and conflict negotiation. A second online course is near fruition. Upcoming on campus is a new course, Negotiation by Design, to be co-taught at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, a/k/a the Stanford d.school, with NSF-funded EpiCenter’s Deputy Director, Leticia Britos-Cavagnaro, Ph.D. Not surprisingly, negotiation is a core component of David’s consulting practice.