Nick Dranias

Nick Dranias is general counsel to Honduras Próspera Inc. and its affiliates, where he describes himself as one of the principal architects of the Próspera platform, implementing policies meant to widen economic freedom inside a special economic zone. He has chaired the board of the Próspera Arbitration Center, the zone’s default arbitration body, since 2020. He has authored more than a hundred articles on law and public policy and comments on constitutional questions for Fox News and other outlets.

He took a degree in economics and philosophy at Boston University in 1993, graduating cum laude, and his law degree at Loyola University Chicago School of Law in 1996, where he served on the law review. He practised at Dranias, Harrington and Wilson in Chicago until 2005, then spent three years as a staff attorney at the Institute for Justice. From 2008 to 2014 he was general counsel and constitutional policy director at the Goldwater Institute, where he held the Duncan Chair and directed its Moller Center, and where he helped secure a First Amendment victory at the Supreme Court against public financing of political campaigns. He later served as senior litigation counsel in the Arizona Attorney General’s office, and has taught ethical and legal issues in business at Grand Canyon University since 2018.

As president of the Compact for America Educational Foundation from 2014 to 2018 he led a national effort for a federal balanced budget amendment built on an interstate compact, which five states joined. His recent work concerns the ethics of artificial intelligence. He is the architect of Excellence Ethics, a virtue based framework for AI safety and governance, and has testified before the Arizona House of Representatives on protecting individual rights in the age of artificial intelligence. The book setting the framework out, Why Excellence Matters: Building Better AI through Better Ethics, was published in 2025, runs to almost seven hundred pages, and credits as its co-author and lead drafter Claude, the AI assistant made by Anthropic. He is building JurisMaximus on the same foundation, an arbitration system meant to reason from legal principles rather than from statistical patterns.