Faculty Spotlights: Professors Eric Ruben and Carla L. Reyes

Professor Carla Reyes Provides Insight on Blockchain Technology

Professor Carla L. Reyes is taking her legal expertise and her interest in decentralized technology and fusing them together in trailblazing ways, giving her the ability to anticipate innovations and propose policies that are years ahead of their time.

An associate professor at SMU Dedman School of Law, Reyes has been working in the blockchain space as both a practicing lawyer and as an educator consulting on technologies that few understand as deeply as she does, while operating in an area of law that is still being charted.

“I think that there’s a strong need for education around what blockchain technology is and how it works, the vocabulary, what the technical nuances are in the technology, and the different types of protocols in a way that is digestible and usable by lawmakers and policy makers,” said Professor Reyes.

Before entering academia, she practiced as an associate in the Blockchain Technology and Digital Currency industry group at Perkins Coie LLP. She went on to teach at Michigan State College of Law as the Director of the Center for Law, Technology, & Innovation. Today, universities around the world are jockeying for Reyes’ expertise to inform their tech programs, including Stanford’s CodeX, MIT’s Cryptoeconomic Systems program, and University College London’s Blockchain Research Centre.

When organizations ask for her insight, she brings both her enthusiasm and a clear-eyed, academic perspective to the table that institutions value. “There’s a lot of hype around blockchain,” she said. “There’s a lot of hype around AI. It’s really important to understand how the technology works, so that you are capable yourself of distinguishing the difference between the hype and the reality.”

So, what is blockchain technology? Professor Reyes explains: “A blockchain protocol is just computer software. That is, it’s protocol software. It sets the rules for computers to talk to each other about something specific – in this case, the recording of data about transactions. The software allows people who are pretty dispersed geographically and who don’t know each other and don’t necessarily trust each other, to come to an agreement about the existence and evolution of shared facts between them without relying on a third party intermediary.”

Her emphasis on the technical side of blockchain undergirds her teaching methodology at SMU, where this summer she was awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor at Dedman Law. She teaches courses on secured transactions, business enterprises, artificial intelligence & the law, and blockchain law & policy, and encourages her students to dig deep on day one.

“In my blockchain class, we spend the first three weeks reading out of a computer science textbook to get a grip on what the technology is and isn’t and exactly how it works across various protocols and what the differences are across different types of blockchain technology,” said Professor Reyes. “All of those technical nuances in my opinion, are important, not just for the creation of legal frameworks in the space, but also for the practice of law in this area.

“I do hope that students get from any of my classes a better sense of what practicing in that area would look like in the real world, outside of law school, so I tend to incorporate an experiential emphasis in all of my classes. When my students go out to practice with clients in a high technology space [where] they have products and services that incorporate AI or blockchain technology, they’re going to have to understand the technical details in order to impart good legal advice. The more capable they are of conversing at a very technical level about these topics, the better the advice they’ll be able to deliver.”
Professor Reyes’ methodology has paid off in her own professional career. Her deep technical knowledge and legal background are in high demand among organizations and committees across the nation and internationally. She is the Research Director of the Uniform Law Commission’s Technology Committee, Associate Research Director of the Permanent Editorial Board of the Uniform Commercial Code, and an Expert Member of UNIDROIT’s Work Group on Private Law and Digital Assets and UNIDROIT’s Work Group on Best Practices for Effective Enforcement.

Her work has earned her accolades, including the American Bar Association’s Women of Legal Tech distinction, and lawmaking bodies like the Texas and Wyoming legislatures have sought her expert opinion on how blockchain technology works, what permanent effects it could have on society, and how representatives can set priorities around it.

In 2021, she was appointed Chair of the Texas Work Group on Blockchain Matters where she consulted on policy priorities related to blockchain technology in Texas.

“There’s a lot of blockchain-related activity in Texas on a number of different industry vectors,” she said. “It was engaging, fulfilling, and exciting to be able to contribute to the policy discussions around blockchain technology and its use cases. We wrote a very long report at the end. A number of our recommendations were adopted already, and some are still coming down the pipe.”

On the national level, Professor Reyes recently sat before a Congressional subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee for a hearing on blockchains and what industry players call ‘Web3’ – a layer-by-layer approach to leveraging blockchains for business, finance, consumer use, and anything else that blockchain might be able to harness and improve.

As discussions in D.C. usually center on the financial use case for blockchain, the truth is that the technology can be used in more ways than one, said Professor Reyes. “Many of the use cases have nothing to do with financial applications, and they wanted to get a better sense of what those other use cases were so that they could ensure that whatever action they’re taking on the financial side doesn’t impede or conflict with other uses of the technology.”

She said her goal has been to demystify blockchain technology and explore the use of smart contracts and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that operate on the blockchain. In order to welcome these innovations into the market, she has recommended that the government take a technology-neutral policy stance. “The protocol is just a protocol, sort of like the internet,” said Professor Reyes. “It’s what people do with it that that matters.”

Professor Reyes is committed to developing the next generation of legal minds at Dedman Law both in and out of the classroom. She is the coach for SMU’s Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot Court Team, and she was the coach for the 2021 SMU team that won for the seller side at Baylor Law’s “The Closer” National Transactional Law Competition.

“I’m pretty busy on all fronts,” she admits. “But, in my area of practice you are motivated to continually learn and dive deeper. It doesn’t always feel like work. There are always new developments in the field, which is both stimulating and exhausting, but it’s what makes it so much fun.

“I think I’m living the dream.”

Professor Eric Ruben Offers his Expertise on Gun Control and the Second Amendment

Few issues in American discourse spark as much controversy or division as the Second Amendment, which is why national news media – everyone from NPR to CNN to The Wall Street Journal – have looked to Professor Eric Ruben, a level-headed expert in Second Amendment and gun violence issues at the SMU Dedman School of Law, to inform their audiences.

Professor Ruben is an Associate Professor of Law at the Dedman School of Law who specializes in a range of topics related to guns and constitutional law, including criminal law, criminal procedure, legal ethics, and weapons law. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of gun regulations and Second Amendment rights.

“This is a hugely polarizing issue,” said Professor Ruben. “One of the things that I try to do when I teach and write about it is to treat it seriously as a matter of law, not just as a matter of rhetoric or politics. If you’re able to legalize an issue, it’s possible to teach it, talk about it, and discuss it without all the heat.”

Professor Ruben’s been involved in Second Amendment conversations since 2014, but he started his career pursuing a different legal path.

“I graduated from law school before District of Columbia v. Heller came down, so the Second Amendment was not taught at NYU when I was there for law school,” he said. “This entire field is younger than the first iPhone. It’s in the nascent stages of development. Being able to influence that development makes it really exciting for me.” Fresh out of law school and a clerkship for Judge Julio Fuentes of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, Professor Ruben worked as a criminal defense attorney for six years where he defended dozens of clients in a range of matters. His experience as a criminal defense attorney was life-changing. He has spent much of his academic career researching legal issues that arose in his practice.

“My interest in the law surrounding violence, weapons, and the Second Amendment hasn’t always been there. It sort of bubbled up during my criminal law practice. Some of my clients had been charged with crimes of violence. It was through the course of such representations, and one representation in particular, that I became focused on the Second Amendment.”

He was involved in the initial intake and arraignment process for indigent defendants one day when his firm was assigned to represent an individual who had sold firearms in South Carolina out of his home to make some extra cash. Some of those firearms ended up in New York where they were used to commit crimes.

“I was struck by the ease with which firearms that are sold in a state with lax gun laws can end up on the streets of a faraway city and used in crime. It opened my eyes to a fascinating area of law and policy at the intersection of rights and regulation. These were the years right after the shooting at Sandy Hook, which really galvanized people to focus more on this issue in a way that they hadn’t, even more than after the Heller decision came out in 2008.”

When he heard that the Brennan Center for Justice was looking to hire a Fellow to research gun violence and Second Amendment issues, he applied for the role and was hired. For the next half-decade, Professor Ruben became an expert on the matter, researching and writing through his fellowship, which also gave him the opportunity to teach a Second Amendment class at the NYU School of Law as an adjunct with one of the nation’s only Second Amendment scholars at the time, Jim Jacobs. One of the Brennan Center’s priorities is to make legal research available to the public at large even when the issue is complex. Thus, as part of his fellowship, Professor Ruben learned to communicate with the media to make his work as accessible as possible.

His public profile took on a new dimension with last year’s SCOTUS ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol v. Bruen, which struck down a New York restriction on gun carrying. Professor Ruben had written extensively on the issue, and his articles were referenced in over a dozen briefs in the case. Ultimately, his work was cited in both the majority and dissenting opinions. News media scrambled to get Professor Ruben’s opinion on the ruling. Over the past two years, he has made more than 100 media appearances.

In March of 2023, he was invited to serve as one of five expert witnesses to testify before the U.S. Senate Committee for the Judiciary in a full committee hearing on protecting public safety after Bruen. He advised the committee on the nature of the decision and how firearm regulations had not been fully ruled out.

He also described how the decision had introduced a new historical-analogical test for evaluating the constitutionality of modern laws addressing modern gun issues. This new test, said Professor Ruben, has caused a substantial amount of uncertainty for Second Amendment doctrine because courts are struggling to compare modern laws to historical ones, as they are required to do under Bruen. In SCOTUS’s 2023-2024 term, the high court will be considering whether it is constitutional to disarm people subject to domestic violence restraining orders. Keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers is of top importance to Professor Ruben, but confusion caused by Bruen has thrown that objective into doubt. Ruben is submitting a brief in the case and will likely remain in high demand with media outlets.

“One of the things that judges do when they hear constitutional rights cases is they create the doctrine implementing that [constitutional] right,” he explained. “They come up with rules and the standards for how to adjudicate Second Amendment claims. We’re still pretty close to the ground in terms of the creation of that doctrine, and the Supreme Court has pivoted in certain ways in terms of how it views Second Amendment methodology.

“That’s really where I insert myself and my research— in that methodological question. I expect that it’s going to take decades for the Second Amendment to mature into an area of law with well-established rules and standards. It’s just going to take time.”

In his professorial role at Dedman Law, Professor Ruben hopes his students leave his classes with not only an appreciation for the letter and history of the law, but also a sense of agency in the way we structure our legal system.

“I want my students to come away with an appreciation that they can have a role in shaping the rules and standards we develop to implement legal norms. The law itself is organic, it evolves, and lawyers are doing the work of pushing the law so that we as a society can achieve optimal outcomes.

“I try to keep the material grounded so that it is relevant. The J.D. isn’t a pie in the sky degree. We are training lawyers who will go on and practice in the real world.”

One thing he has learned from his practice as a criminal defense attorney and as a scholar who is a leader of the public discussion on one of the most heated debates in modern America, is the importance of respectful dialogue.

“It’s especially important to be civil and to learn how to listen respectfully and engage skillfully. That’s an important lesson in criminal law and weapons law, but I also think it’s an important lesson for lawyers in our society more generally. Having the ability to listen to people who don’t view the world the same way as you do, and to understand other perspectives and respond civilly even if you disagree, is a skill that hopefully SMU Dedman Law students develop during their years on the Hilltop.”