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 2023. 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 (forthcoming in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy). I am currently working on a paper on prison abolition and crime prevention, where I argue that we cannot reasonably claim that incarceration is necessary for preventing crime. 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. Some of my current projects are about 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