Hello, welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I earned my Ph.D. in Philosophy at Rutgers, New Brunswick in 2024. I work in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, and their intersection.

I am especially interested in the ethics of policing and punishment. I recently wrote a paper arguing that we should “unbundle” the police, reallocating powers and responsibilities from police to other institutions and reducing the footprint of policing. I am currently working on papers on prison abolition and crime prevention and the structure of functional critique (i.e. prisons function to maintain hierachies). Methodologically, I aim to put ideas emanating from social movements into conversation with analytic ethics and political philosophy. 

I am also interested in the ethics of technology, and am working projects on electronic monitoring as an alternative to incarceration and the ethics of police surveillance.

In addition to academic articles, I write philosophical op-eds. I recently published two in the San Francisco Chronicle: one about the ethics of protest voting and another about opting out of the TSA facial recognition system.

Beyond philosophizing, I like traveling, disco, cooking, dogs, hiking, and hanging out with my very cool girlfriend Mariel. 

My pronouns are she/her, and you can reach me at lyons [a t] ucsc.edu