David D. Friedman

David D. Friedman is an economist, legal scholar, and fiction writer whose academic work focuses on law, economics, and the consequences of institutional choices. Salamander is his second novel, a fantasy set in a society where magic is moving from inherited craft toward systematic science. Its central figures include Magister Coelus, a powerful practitioner, and Ellen, a student whose abilities place her near an ambitious project with political implications. Independent bibliographic records date the novel to 2011 and classify it as fantasy, while Friedman’s own account identifies Brothers as its sequel. That sequence gives Salamander a place within a continuing invented world rather than as an isolated experiment. The novel’s interest in rules, knowledge, incentives, and power also has a clear affinity with Friedman’s nonfiction concerns, although it develops them through character and magical conflict. His career joins university teaching, public argument, and speculative storytelling without treating those forms as interchangeable.