Dr. Bill Maurer

Bill Maurer is a cultural anthropologist who conducts research on law, property, money and finance, focusing on the technological infrastructures and social relations of exchange and payment. He has particular expertise in emerging, alternative and experimental forms of money and finance, payment technologies, and their legal implications. He has published on topics ranging from offshore financial services to mobile phone-enabled money transfers, Islamic finance, alternative currencies, blockchain/distributed ledger systems and their implications for money and law, and the future of money. He is founding director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and was the founding co-director of the Intel Science and Technology Center in Social Computing.

Dr. Mona Lynch

Mona Lynch is Professor and Chancellor’s Fellow in Criminology, Law and Society and, by courtesy, the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine. Trained as a social psychologist, her research focuses on plea bargaining, criminal sentencing, and punishment, and on institutionalized forms of bias within criminal justice settings. She uses multiple methods in her research, ranging from qualitative field methods to experiments, to quantitative modeling. Her current major project, funded by National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Sciences program, uses a mock jury experimental paradigm to examine how racial bias gets activated and elaborated through group-level deliberations.

Her research has been published in a wide range of journals, law reviews, and edited volumes including American Journal of Criminal Law, British Journal of Criminology, Criminology and Public Policy; Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology; Law and Human Behavior; Law & Social Inquiry; Law and Society Review; Law and Policy; Punishment and Society; Miami Law Review; Michigan State Law Review; Studies in Law, Politics, and Society; and Theoretical Criminology. She is also the author of Sunbelt Justice: Arizona and the Transformationof American Punishment (2009), published with Stanford University Press and Hard Bargains: The Power to Punish in Federal Court (2016), with Russell Sage Foundation Press.