Students Take a Deep Dive into Connecticut Policymaking

Professor of Law Zachary Liscow ’15 inadvertently gave his students a firsthand example of how government doesn’t always work as well as it should when he assigned some reading for his Connecticut Policy Lab course.

For one discussion in September, Liscow had asked the class to read documents about rail transportation in Connecticut that were posted on the state’s website. But the links were broken, and students couldn’t access the readings.

“That happens a lot,” Liscow said. “The state’s IT systems often don’t work. The website to sign up for Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income people, is also very challenging for people to navigate.”

Making government work better is the focus of Liscow’s course, which uses Connecticut as a case study for understanding the legal foundations of government effectiveness. The course, taught this fall, covers the basics of policymaking and includes guest speakers with experience in state and local government. 

Liscow teaches several policy-oriented classes on topics like designing tax policy, but the Connecticut Policy Lab class takes a different approach to policy by focusing on the “nuts and bolts” of how government works, he said. 

Working collaboratively with government is not often a focus of law school classes or clinics. “In fact, we often do the opposite,” Liscow said. “We teach students to sue governments, and we talk a lot about adding more procedures—typically for good reasons—but that often make it harder for government to work. This course explores the other side of that.”

Connecticut is a good case study in government effectiveness for several reasons, he said. It is one of the wealthiest states in the country but also grapples with aging infrastructure, high electricity prices, little new housing construction, high debt, and extreme income inequality.

At the core, these challenges are often legal or regulatory, Liscow said, and they offer learning opportunities for students with career interests in public policy and government. “I want students to think about not just policy design issues, but the policy implementation issues that are often so crucial and often underdiscussed,” he said.

For the class, Liscow draws on his research on how more government procedure drives up the cost of building infrastructure, and how hiring more and higher-quality civil servants can pay for itself many times over.  He also draws on his own experience in government as well as that of his guest speakers. In 2022–23, he served as chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget at the White House. 

I want students to think about not just policy design issues, but the policy implementation issues that are often so crucial and often underdiscussed.”

—Professor Zachary Liscow

The multidisciplinary course covers a range of topics in state government, including economic growth and the state budget, infrastructure, transportation, Medicaid, housing, and the role of public sector unions. The course also draws on emerging literature on the “abundance agenda,” which argues that the regulatory environment in many cities and states, though well intentioned, stymies development. 

Readings cover a variety of issues — why a train trip from New Haven to New York City was faster 100 years ago, how the permitting process drives up the cost of building new infrastructure, what restrains the ability to hire enough civil servants, and proposals to fix the public hearing process for new housing.

Ivana Bozic ’26 is interested in a career in public policy and jumped at the chance to take a class directly focused on the subject. She said the course content feels especially timely. 

“It responds to, and helps students evaluate, the current debate about how to increase government efficiency and state capacity, and the broader ‘abundance’ movement that writers like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have been discussing,” she said.

Jack Davidson, a joint JD/MBA student, chose the course because he was interested in the applied nature of the class and its focus on specific issues in Connecticut. One highlight was talking to guest speakers Patrick Hulin ’20, Gov. Ned Lamont’s policy director, and Jonny Dach ’13, the governor’s former chief of staff, who gave him insights about working in state and local government and how they think about some of the big issues confronting the state.

“It was super helpful to me as I think about future career considerations inside and outside the public sector, and for understanding some Connecticut-specific issues I’ve been thinking about, like hyperlocalism and fragmentation, and infrastructure notice and comment processes,” Davidson said.

Additional guest speakers include Liz Keyes, chief of legal and regulatory affairs at the state Department of Transportation; Joel Norwood, deputy chief policy advisor for Connecticut Medicaid; New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker; Connecticut State Representative Steve Winter; and Robert Gordon ’98, former deputy assistant to the president for economic mobility and former director of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

Bozic said she found the discussion with the Department of Transportation to be especially interesting. “We learned about the procedural, political, and social obstacles to building new infrastructure — most of which weren’t obvious from our academic readings and aren’t things I would have learned without this guest speaker,” she said.

“Understanding these specific pitfalls helped me start brainstorming potential solutions for how we might make government work more efficiently and more rationally,” she added.

Students in the course are assigned to write a paper on an aspect of government effectiveness in Connecticut, and Liscow expects to reconvene the class in the spring to present the papers to policymakers. Some topics they plan to write about include how the state can leverage artificial intelligence (AI), the slow hiring process at state agencies, improving train service in the state, and the factors that lead infrastructure projects to be cancelled.

“The main point of the class, of course, is learning, but maybe we’ll also make a difference on the ground by helping people inside government make Connecticut work better,” Liscow said.