Israela Lerer

After the Politique du Pire: Costly Commitment, Institutional Adaptation, and the Reproduction of Political Elites

The politique du pire is a strategy of provocation in which a materially weaker actor seeks to induce a state response so excessive that the regime damages its own legitimacy. This theoretical working paper asks what may survive after an armed strategy is defeated. It does not po...

Iusespace as an Institutional State Space: Legal Configurations, Informational Projection, and the Conditions for Studying Normative Hysteresis

Legal interventions are often described through changes in normative texts, while their implementation and reversal depend on a wider configuration of institutions, practices, capabilities, and effects. This paper develops iusespace as an analytical representation of those relati...

From Phenotype to Law as Extended Phenotype: An Intellectual Archaeology of Evolutionary Legal Theory and the Reconstruction of a Research Programme

This conceptual and genealogical preprint reconstructs the intellectual antecedents of the Extended Phenotype Theory of Law (EPT). It distinguishes the broader tradition that treats law as an evolutionary phenomenon from EPT's specific Dawkins-inspired claim that laws are extende...

Fight, Flight, or Regulate? US Frontier AI, Regulatory Competition, and the Public Allocation of Risk

This conceptual preprint connects Extended Phenotype Theory (EPT), evolutionary game theory (EGT), and multilevel selection to US frontier AI governance and competition with China. It distinguishes enforceable cooperation, competitive protection and responsibility displacement as...