Faculty Profile

Professor Jones is an economist and legal academic whose research centers on contract theory and pioneering empirical methods to study the evolution and diffusion of contracting innovations in settings ranging from international investment treaties to large corporate mergers and acquisitions agreements. Professor Jones is also passionate about supervising student scholarship across a broad range of substantive areas with the common thread of using sophisticated empirical methods to credibly answer important and timely legal questions.

Professor Jones has published (or has work forthcoming) in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, the Administrative Law Review, the Georgia Law Review, the Harvard International Law Journal, and the Yale Journal of International Law. His publications and working papers study the formation and diffusion of drafting preferences in bilateral investment treaties and mergers and acquisitions agreements and articulate an economic theory of term innovation that reconciles a longstanding puzzle in contract theory where theorists assert price should be set last, while in practice price is often set first in many high value agreements. Other papers explore a range of empirical legal questions including the long-run effect of truce negotiations on gang violence in El Salvador, the effect of sampling on the streaming market of sampled songs, the causal relationship between removal restrictions at independent agencies and agency behavior, and the equilibrium response by host countries and investors to unanticipated developments in investor-state arbitration.

Professor Jones holds a PhD in economics (2018) from the University of Chicago, a JD and MPP (2013) from the University of Michigan, an MA in Teaching (2009) from Johns Hopkins University, and a BS in Mathematics (2006) from Brigham Young University. Prior to joining the faculty at BYU Law School, Professor Jones worked as a Harry A. Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School (2018–2020). He also worked as lead consultant to the International Investment Agreements (IIA) Section at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (2012–2017) to design and implement the IIA University Mapping Project, culminating in the creation of a comprehensive public database on the provision-level content of all IIAs with publicly available text.