My research develops a historical-institutionalist account of governance and administrative power. Across domains, I treat law and policy less as discrete disciplinary objects than as governance technologies through which states construct legibility, distribute risk, and moralize obligation.
Rather than explaining administrative regimes primarily through functional efficiency or stated intent, my work emphasizes path dependence, institutional layering, moral framing, and bureaucratic self-reinforcement—the mechanisms by which systems stabilize and persist even when empirical performance is weak.
Selected Research (Peer-Reviewed)
I generally approach law and policy as “infrastructure” from a historical perspective: design choices that, under bounded capacity, compound through feedback and second-order frictions—often producing stable compliance routines alongside recurrent failures.
“The Anti-Money Laundering Complex in the Modern Era.” The Banking Law Journal (2016).
Explains AML as an expanding administrative project driven by moral urgency, measurement problems, and institutional accretion—often persisting and intensifying irrespective effectiveness in achieving stated goals and outcomes.
“Title III of the JOBS Act: Congress Invites Investor Abuse and Leaves the SEC Holding the Bag.” Willamette Law Review (2015).
Traces how securities exemptions reallocate risk through legal design, creating incentive structures that tend to concentrate harm among less-protected investors.
“Bankruptcy, Morality & Student Loans: A Decade of Error in Undue Hardship Analysis.” Ohio Northern University Law Review (2017).
Shows how moralized doctrinal tests and path-dependent reasoning can harden into durable legal practice even when they drift from statutory history and policy intent.
“Police Candidate Selection: Assessing the Effectiveness of Pre-employment Polygraph Screening.” Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice (2018).
Evaluates polygraph screening as a governance technology, testing whether the practice meaningfully reduces downstream risk, and what institutional incentives sustain it when results are ambiguous.
“God, Guns & Money: A Global Perspective on Intentional Homicide.” Western State University Law Review (2016).
Uses cross-national patterns to stress-test familiar causal stories about violence and to foreground the institutional and cultural mechanisms that shape comparative homicide rates.
“International Drug Reform: Medicalised Harm Reduction, Cannabis and the Global Legislative Reality.” Journal of Drug Policy Analysis (2018).
Maps drug-policy reform as a problem of constraint and coordination, highlighting treaty limits and the institutional pathways through which harm reduction becomes politically unfeasible despite demonstrated empirical efficacy.
Invited / Professional Commentary
“The Globalisation of Policing: A Familiar Tune.” The Informer (Strategic Hub for Organised Crime Research) (2018).
“Anti-Money Laundering Rules: A Paper Bureaucracy in a Digital World.” Oxford Business Law Blog (2017).
“New Equity Crowdfunding Rules Leave U.S. Investors Vulnerable to Abuse.” Oxford Business Law Blog (2016).
Current work
My forthcoming monograph, The Architecture of Obligation, extends this framework to monetary system formation and fiscal-monetary governance.
D.L. White 