Eric Alston

Eric Alston is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wyoming College of Law, where he teaches Torts, Banking Law, and the Law and Regulation of Digital Currencies and AI. His scholarship applies law and economics, new institutional economics, and constitutional design to questions of how rules are made, enforced, and changed, researching institutional contexts ranging from constitutions, resource frontiers, and increasingly, digitally networked orders.

His research spans three connected strands. The first addresses digital governance: the tense relationship between privacy and information technology, special jurisdictions and novel forms of digital economic activity, technology adoption and sovereignty in Indian Country, and the allocation of judgment and penalties between human and artificial agents. That work is grounded in the sustained study of distributed networks, which he analyzes both as constitutional and competitive polycentric orders and as subjects of external legal regulation, from the limits of industry self-regulation to automated penalty institutions and civil liability for DAO controllers. The second addresses constitutional design and change, including the political economy of Ecuador's 2008 constitution, interim constitutions, and the measurement of constitutional entrenchment. The third examines the legal and economic history of the American West, particularly how property, water, and land policy shaped nineteenth-century development. His work appears in the Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Institutional Economics, Public Choice, Regulation & Governance, and the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology, among others. Animating these three areas of research is a broader interest in better understanding how institutions emerge, how constitutional constraints bind in proportion to the cost of exit, and how organizations and polities alike behave as complex adaptive systems, all contributions developed at book length in Institutional and Organizational Analysis: Concepts and Applications (2018), which he co-authored, and the Handbook on Institutions and Complexity (2025), which he co-edited.

Alongside his academic work, Professor Alston serves as a Senior Governance Researcher at Dynamical Systems Group and as a trustee of one of the world's first special-purpose data trusts, and he has advised on governance design for networks and organizations including MakerDAO, Uniswap, Cardano, and the Ethereum Foundation. He has previously provided expert technical assistance to constitution-drafting processes in Yemen, Libya, Kenya, and Somalia through International IDEA, the UNDP, and IDLO. He holds a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, an M.A. in economics from the University of Maryland, and a B.A. in economics and Spanish from the University of Illinois.

Teaching: Torts, Banking Law, and the Law and Regulation of Digital Currencies and AI