New Challenges for Law and Economics

 

Academic Orginizers and presenters:

 

Hanoch Dagan

The Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University

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Hanoch Dagan is the Stewart and Judy Colton Professor of Legal Theory and Innovation and the Director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel-Aviv University. Professor Dagan is a former Dean of Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law and also served as the founding director of the Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies, the director of The Cegla Center for Interdisciplinary Research of the Law, and the Editor in Chief of Theoretical Inquiries in Law. Among his many publications are over 90 articles in major law reviews and journals, such as Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review and more. Professor Dagan has also written seven books, including Property: Values and Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2011), Reconstructing American Legal Realism & Rethinking Private Law Theory (Oxford University Press, 2013), and The Choice Theory of Contracts (with Michael A. Heller) (Cambridge University Press, 2017). His new book – A Liberal Theory of Property – is forthcoming this year with Cambridge University Press. Professor Dagan has been a visiting professor at Yale, Columbia, Michigan, Cornell, UCLA, and Toronto. Dagan delivered keynote speeches and endowed lectures at Singapore, Alabama, Toronto, Queensland, Cape Town, Monash (Melbourne), and Oxford. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the International Academy of Comparative Law. Dagan obtained his LL.M. and J.S.D. from Yale Law School after receiving his LL.B., summa cum laude, from Tel Aviv University.

 

Robert E. Scott

Columbia Law School

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The director of Columbia Law School’s Center for Contract and Economic Organization, Robert Scott is an internationally recognized scholar and teacher in the fields of contracts, commercial transactions, and bankruptcy. He has co-authored six books on contracts and commercial transactions, including, most recently, The 3½ Minute Transaction: Boilerplate and the Limits of Contract Design (with Mitu Gulati). His many articles in leading law journals include six co-authored with Charles Goetz that set the standard for the economic analysis of contract law.

Scott served as the Justin W. D’Atri Visiting Professor of Law, Business, and Society at Columbia Law School from 2001 to 2006 and joined the Columbia Law School faculty full-time in 2006. In 2014, he assumed the role of interim dean of the Law School. Before joining Columbia, Scott was a member of the University of Virginia School of Law faculty from 1974 to 2006 and served as the school’s dean from 1991 to 2001. During his deanship, the School of Law embarked on a landmark capital campaign that raised more money at the time than any other law school in history; he oversaw a $50 million renovation of the law school’s grounds, developed innovative ways of promoting faculty scholarship and instituted several curricular enhancements.

Scott is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a life fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and a member of the American Law Institute. He was president of the American Law Deans Association from 1999 to 2001 and president of the American Law & Economics Association from 2014 to 2015. He has chaired the Association of American Law Schools’ Sections on Contract Law, Law and Economics, and Commercial and Consumer Law. As a J.D. student, he was editor in chief of the William & Mary Law Review, and from 2008 to 2016, he served on William & Mary’s governing board, after being appointed to the role by Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine.
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Presenters:     

 

Jennifer H. Arlen

New York University School of Law

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Jennifer Arlen’s scholarship focuses on corporate criminal enforcement, medical malpractice, and experimental law and economics. She has served as the President of both the American Law and Economics Association and the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (which she co-founded in 2005). She currently is the Associate Reporter for enforcement for the American Law Institute’s Principles of Law, Compliance, Enforcement, and Risk Management for Corporations. She also is on the Editorial Board of the American Law and Economics Review. A prolific scholar, Arlen has edited three books and has published in leading journals including the Rand Journal of Economics, Journal of Law & Economics, Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, Journal of Legal Analysis, Yale Law Journal, Chicago Law Review, NYU Law Review, and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.

Arlen received her B.A. in economics from Harvard College (1982, magna cum laude) and her J.D. (1986, Order of the Coif) and Ph.D. in economics (1992) from New York University. Arlen has been a Visiting Professor at the California Institute of Technology, Harvard Law School, and Yale Law School, and was the Ivadelle and Theodore Johnson Professor of Law and Business at USC Gould School of Law before coming to NYU. She clerked for Judge Phyllis Kravitch on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. Arlen teaches Corporations, Business Crime, and a seminar on Corporate Crime and Financial Misdealing.

 

Oren Bar-Gill

Harvard Law School

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Oren Bar-Gill's scholarship focuses on the law and economics of contracts and contracting. His publications include: SEDUCTION BY CONTRACT: LAW, ECONOMICS AND PSYCHOLOGY IN CONSUMER MARKETS (Oxford University Press, 2012); "Exchange Efficiency with Weak Ownership Rights" (with Nicola Persico), which was published in the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics; "Product Use Information and the Limits of Voluntary Disclosure" (with Oliver Board), which appeared in the American Law and Economics Review (2012); "Consent and Exchange" (with Lucian Bebchuk), which appeared in the Journal of Legal Studies (2010); "The Law, Economics, and Psychology of Subprime Mortgage Contracts," which appeared in the Cornell Law Review (2009); "The Prisoners' (Plea Bargain) Dilemma" (with Omri Ben-Shahar), which appeared in the Journal of Legal Analysis (2009); "Making Credit Safer" (with Elizabeth Warren), which appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review (2008); "Bundling and Consumer Misperception," which appeared in the University of Chicago Law Review (2006); "Credible Coercion" (with Omri Ben-Shahar), which appeared in the Texas Law Review (2005); "Seduction by Plastic," which appeared in the Northwestern University Law Review (2004); and "The Law of Duress and the Economics of Credible Threats" (with Omri Ben-Shahar), which appeared in the Journal of Legal Studies (2004).

Bar-Gill joined Harvard Law School in July 2014 from New York University School of Law, where he was the Evelyn and Harold Meltzer Professor of Law and Economics. Bar-Gill holds a B.A. (economics), LL.B., M.A. (law & economics) and Ph.D. (economics) from Tel-Aviv University, as well as an LL.M. and S.J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Bar-Gill is the recipient of the American Law Institute's Young Scholars Medal (in 2011). He currently serves (together with Omri Ben-Shahar and Florencia Marotta-Wurgler) as Reporter for the Restatement of the Law, Consumer Contracts. Bar-Gill serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Legal Analysis

 

Albert H. Choi

University of Michigan Law School

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Albert H. Choi is a professor of law. His research and teaching interests include corporate law, contract law, corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, and law and economics. He earned his JD from Yale Law School and his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While at Yale, he was an Olin Fellow in Law and Economics and earned John M. Olin Research fellowships in the summers of 2000 and 2001. At MIT, he was a National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellow.

From 2001 through 2005, Choi was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Virginia, and from 2005 through 2019, he was an associate professor and then professor at the University of Virginia Law School. He also was a visiting professor at Yale Law School in 2008-2009, the Austin Wakeman Scott Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School in 2009-2010, the Joseph F. Cunningham Visiting Professor of Law at Columbia Law School in fall 2015, and a visiting professor at University of Pennsylvania Law School in 2017-2018.

From 2011 to 2014, he served as a director of the American Law and Economics Association. He currently is co-editor at the American Law and Economics Review. His research is published at many top economics and law journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Industrial Economics, Yale Law Journal, NYU Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Journal of Legal Studies, and Journal of Law and Economics.

                                                                         

Lee Fennell

University of Chicago Law School

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Lee Fennell joined the Law School faculty in 2007, having previously served as a Bigelow Fellow from 1999 to 2001. In the intervening years, she taught at the University of Texas School of Law from 2001 to 2004 and at the University of Illinois College of Law from 2004 to 2007. She has also held visiting positions at Yale Law School, NYU School of Law, and the University of Virginia School of Law. She received her JD magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center in 1990. Before teaching law, she practiced at Pettit & Martin, the State and Local Legal Center, and the Virginia School Boards Association.

Her teaching and research interests include property, torts, land use, housing, social welfare law, state and local government law, and public finance. She is the author of The Unbounded Home: Property Values Beyond Property Lines (Yale University Press 2009) and Slices and Lumps: Division and Aggregation in Law and Life (University of Chicago Press, 2019), as well as many articles and essays.

 

 

Roy Kreitner

The Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University

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Roy Kreitner teaches courses on private law, legal history, and law and political thought at the law school, where he has been on the faculty since 2001. He received an S.J.D. from Harvard Law School, an LL.B. and an M.A. (Comparative Literature & Semiotics) from Tel-Aviv University, and an A.B. from Brown University. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia and at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Calculating Promises: The Emergence of Modern American Contract Doctrine (Stanford University Press, 2007). During 2009-2010 he was a fellow at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow. In 2010-2011 he was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School.

 

Saul Levmore

University of Chicago Law School

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Saul Levmore came to the Law School from the University of Virginia. He was the Dean of the University of Chicago Law School from 2001 to 2009, and is the William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor of Law. He has been a visiting professor at Yale, Harvard, Michigan, and Northwestern. He has taught and written about torts, corporations, copyright, non-profit organizations, comparative law, public choice, corporate tax, commercial law, insurance, and contracts. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a past president of the American Law Deans Association, and a past trustee of the Law School Admissions Council and of the Skadden Foundation. He is currently the President of the American Law and Economics Association. Away from law, he has been an advisor on corporate governance issues and on development strategies and although his work continues to be related to law and economics, and especially public choice, across many fields he has also written books on aging and on games and puzzles.

 

Daniel Markovits

Yale Law School

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Daniel Markovits is Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Private Law.

Markovits works in the philosophical foundations of private law, moral and political philosophy, and behavioral economics. He publishes in a range of disciplines, including in Science, The American Economic Review, and The Yale Law Journal.

Markovits’s current book, The Meritocracy Trap (forthcoming, Penguin Press), places meritocracy at the center of rising economic inequality and social and political dysfunction. The book takes up the law, economics, and politics of human capital to identify the mechanisms through which meritocracy breeds inequality and to expose the burdens that meritocratic inequality imposes on all who fall within meritocracy’s orbit.

After earning a B.A. in Mathematics, summa cum laude from Yale University, Markovits received a British Marshall Scholarship to study in England, where he was awarded an M.Sc. in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the L.S.E. and a B.Phil. and D.Phil. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford. Markovits then returned to Yale to study law and, after clerking for the Honorable Guido Calabresi, joined the faculty at Yale.

 

Eric A. Posner

University of Chicago Law School

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Eric Posner is Kirkland and Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago. His research interests include financial regulation, international law, and constitutional law. His books include Radical Markets (Princeton, 2018) (with Glen Weyl); Last Resort: The Financial Crisis and the Future of Bailouts (University of Chicago Press, 2018); The Twilight of International Human Rights (Oxford, 2014); Economic Foundations of International Law (with Alan Sykes) (Harvard, 2013); Contract Law and Theory (Aspen, 2011); The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic (with Adrian Vermeule) (Oxford, 2011); Climate Change Justice (with David Weisbach) (Princeton, 2010); The Perils of Global Legalism (Chicago, 2009); Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty and the Courts (with Adrian Vermeule) (Oxford, 2007); New Foundations of Cost-Benefit Analysis (with Matthew Adler) (Harvard, 2006); The Limits of International Law (with Jack Goldsmith) (Oxford, 2005); Law and Social Norms (Harvard, 2000); Chicago Lectures in Law and Economics (editor) (Foundation, 2000); Cost-Benefit Analysis: Legal, Economic, and Philosophical Perspectives (editor, with Matthew Adler) (University of Chicago, 2001). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Law Institute.

 

Alan Schwartz

Yale Law School

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Alan Schwartz is a Sterling Professor at Yale University. His appointments are in the Yale Law School and the Yale School of Management. Professor Schwartz’s academic specialties include corporate finance and corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcy, contracts and commercial transactions. He has published numerous articles and books in these fields. He has been identified, by the Institute of Scientific Information, as being in the top one half of one percent of social scientists worldwide in total citations, and by HeinOnline as one of the fifty most cited law professors of all time. Professor Schwartz has been President of the American Law and Economics Association and Editor of The Journal of Law, Economics and Organization. He is currently a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Schwartz also is a Director of Cliffs Natural Resources Co. and Furniture Brands International, both of which are traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Professor Schwartz consults as an expert in corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcy, contracts and commercial law.

 

Simone M. Sepe

University of Arizona, College of Law

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Professor Sepe's areas of expertise include business organizations, corporate finance, contract theory, and law and economics. His scholarship focuses on corporate governance, corporate finance, and the theory of institutions. He holds doctoral degrees in both law and economics. Professor Sepe practiced banking and finance law at Clifford Chance, an international law firm based in London, and worked as an investment banker at Fortress Investment Group in London and New York.

 

 

 

Kathryn E. Spier

Harvard Law School

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Kathryn E. Spier is the Domenico De Sole Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School and President Emeritus of the American Law and Economics Association.  She received her PhD from MIT in 1989, and her BA in mathematics and economics from Yale in 1985. Before joining the Harvard Law School in 2007, she was for 13 years a professor in the Management and Strategy department at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and served as the Richard M. Paget Distinguished Professor. Before that, she served as assistant and associate professor in the Harvard Economics Department. Professor Spier is currently serving as a co-editor of the RAND Journal of Economics, an associate editor of the American Economic Review, and is a Research Associate in the Law and Economics Group of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She has published extensively in the areas of law and economics and industrial organization. Her areas of interest include the economics of litigation, contracts, tort law, antitrust, and business organization.  Professor Spier’s current research on contracts and bargaining is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

 

George Triantis

Stanford Law School

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George Triantis is an expert in the fields of contracts, commercial law, business law, and bankruptcy. He was the Eli Goldston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School before joining the Stanford faculty in 2011, and he has since then returned from time to time as the Sullivan & Cromwell Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard.

Among his contributions to legal scholarship, Professor Triantis pioneered the application of options theory to the study of contracts and commercial law, and authored a series of articles that develop principles of contract design.  His recent publications concern the process of business negotiations, the link between contract design and dispute resolution, the design of legal remedies in commercial contracts, the impact of bargaining power on contract design, and the forces of disruption and innovation in transactional legal practice.  His other writings include analysis of business bankruptcy process and the book Foundations of Commercial Law (Foundation Press, 2009).

Professor Triantis was the Associate Dean for Research at Stanford and faculty co-director of the Stanford Cyber Initiative from 2014 to 2017. His other service roles outside Stanford have included past editor of the Journal of Law & Economics and past director of the American Law & Economics Association. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

 

 

 

Responders:

 

Lisa Bernstein

University of Chicago Law School

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After obtaining a BA in economics from the University of Chicago in 1986 and a JD from Harvard Law School in 1990, Bernstein served as a clerk for the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts and was a visiting research fellow in law and economics at Harvard Law School. She began teaching at Boston University in 1991, and after visiting at the University of Pennsylvania and the Georgetown Law Center, joined the Georgetown faculty in 1995. After visiting the Law School in the fall of 1997 and Columbia Law School in the spring of 1998, Bernstein joined the Law School faculty. She has also been a visiting professor of law at Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, The College of Law and Business in Ramat Gan, and the Interdisciplinary Center in Israel. Bernstein was recently appointed as an international research fellow at the Oxford University Center for Corporate Reputation.

Bernstein's research interests are in the area of contracts and commercial law with a special emphasis on industry specific dispute resolution, modern supply chain relationships, social network analysis, and the intersection of strategy and relational contracting. She is also interested in the design of commercial courts in emerging and transitioning economies and the relationship between social structures and economic development.

 

Richard R.W. Brooks

New York University School of Law

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Formerly the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, Richard R.W. Brooks focuses his scholarship on contracts and agency, among other forms of business and social organization. Brooks has published numerous books and articles that analyze behavior through the lens of economics, custom, and law. His most recent book, Saving the Neighborhood: Racially Restrictive Covenants, Law, and Social Norms, (coauthored with Carol Rose) examines the history and enduring legacy of racially restrictive property agreements (or racial covenants), which the Supreme Court ruled unenforceable in 1948. Yet despite this repudiation, racial covenants lived on in real estate records, influencing the behaviors of lenders, insurers and realtors, as well as the beliefs and expectations of homebuyers and sellers. Over time the impact of racial covenants would fade, but their legal and social significance lingered well beyond 1948. Racial covenants, even without formal enforcement, were effective signals, creating “common knowledge” that guided the actions of real estate professionals and ordinary buyers and sellers in the housing market.

Brooks’ work also includes articles about contract law and theory, experimental economics, the economics of environmental law, fairness, and perceptions of the legal system.

Brooks holds a BA from Cornell University, an MA from the University of California at Berkeley, a JD from The University of Chicago Law School, and a PhD in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. He was a visiting professor at the Law School in 2006 and was most recently the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He also taught previously at Northwestern University School of Law and at Cornell University in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management. Brooks has served as a visiting researcher at the Center in Law, Economics and Organization at the University of Southern California Law School; on an advisory committee to the Social, Behavioral and Economics Sciences Division of the National Science Foundation; and as a research specialist in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice.

 

Avihay Dorfman

The Buchmann Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University

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Avihay Dorfman is a law professor at Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law. He is a graduate of Haifa University (B.A. Economics `04, LL.B. Law `04) and Yale Law School (LL.M. `06, J.S.D. `08). In 2004-2005, he clerked for The Honorable Aharon Barak, the (then) Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel. He is a winner of the 2011 Alon Fellowship (granted by the Council of Higher Education in Israel), the winner of the 2011-2012 Cegla prize for best law review article published by junior faculty in Hebrew, and a winner of the 2013 Cheshin Prize in the category of junior legal scholar.

Dorfman’s primary research and teaching interests include the philosophical foundations of private law, especially torts and property, and theories of political legitimation. His other areas of interests are constitutional rights (in particular, religious liberty).  Representative publications are: 

The Case Against Privatization, 41 Philosophy & Public Affairs 67 (2013) (w/ Alon Harel); Private Ownership and the Standing to Say So, 64 University of Toronto Law Journal 402 (2014); Just Relationships, 116 Columbia Law Review (forthcoming 2016) (w/ Hanoch Dagan); Negligence and Accommodation, Legal Theory (forthcoming 2017)

Dorfman was the Chief Editor of the Tel Aviv U. Law Review (Vol. 37-38).

                                                                         

Ronald J. Gilson

Columbia Law School

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An expert on the law and economics relating to corporations and securities, Ronald Gilson has been a member of the Law School faculty since 1992. He specializes in corporate governance, law and economics, corporate finance, capital markets, complex contracting, mergers and acquisitions, and securities regulation. Gilson has testified in depositions and trials as an expert witness in numerous cases. His scholarship has been frequently cited and followed by the Delaware Court of Chancery and the Delaware Supreme Court.

Gilson is the author of major casebooks on corporate finance and corporate acquisitions, including The Law and Finance of Corporate Acquisitions (with Bernard Black), and Cases and Materials on Corporations (with Jesse Choper and Columbia Law Professor John C. Coffee Jr.). He has also published more than 90 articles in law and economics journals. Gilson served as a reporter of the American Law Institute’s Corporate Governance Project.

Before launching his academic career at Stanford Law School in 1979, Gilson was a partner at a San Francisco law firm and a clerk to Chief Judge David L. Bazelon of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. He is a professor emeritus at Stanford and currently serves as a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research. He is a fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society and serves on the academic advisory board of the Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy, a joint venture between Columbia law and business schools.

Gilson is the independent board chair of American Century Mountain View Mutual Funds. He is also board chair of the Global Corporate Governance Colloquia, a consortium of 12 universities in Asia, Europe, and the United States that are leaders in the fields of law and finance.

 

Lewis A. Kornhauser

New York University School of Law

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An expert in microeconomics, Lewis Kornhauser approaches legal analysis by imagining a "very simple world." In his article, "An Economic Perspective on Stare Decisis," he describes this "simple" approach: The world has a single judge, named Liza. She faces a dilemma. A very strange judicial practice called "precedent" dictates that she must adhere to her own holding in a prior case even though she now thinks she decided it wrongly.

In analyzing her dilemma, Kornhauser first explores the reasons why Liza now thinks the decision is wrong. For each reason, how desirable or undesirable would it be for Liza to stick with the wrong holding? Then, Kornhauser adds a layer of complexity by imagining the existence of other judges besides Liza, and separately examining each possible combination of judges and reasons.

"By systematically isolating different features of an adjudicatory practice, and trying to understand them in a simpler world, we hope to understand better how the more complicated real world behaves," says Kornhauser. "I find it hard to see how people have been talking about stare decisis for so many centuries without separating its different strands and trying to see what the consequences and justifications are in each simplified world."

The approach Kornhauser uses on the Liza problem is basic to microeconomic analysis, and he applies the techniques to a number of institutions. With Professor Lawrence Sager, he has examined the behavior of multiple judge courts. In a case involving at least two issues (such as an allegation of an illegal search and an allegation of jury misconduct, each advanced to overturn the same conviction), Kornhauser and Sager ask whether it matters that a three-judge court votes issue by issue (by asking if there is a majority for the proposition that the search was illegal) rather than on a case-by-case basis (by asking, for example, if there is a majority for the proposition that some reversible error occurred). In circumstances in which the choice of "voting rule" matters, the next inquiry is, which rule is superior?

The range of subjects to which Kornhauser has applied microeconomic analysis is incredibly wide, including fundamental aspects of jurisprudence that may never have been looked at from this perspective. His publications include articles about corporate takeovers, divorce, and methods of assigning monetary values to human lives.

 

Jody Kraus

Columbia Law School

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A lawyer and philosopher, Jody Kraus focuses his scholarship on the relationship between moral and economic theories of law in general, with particular emphasis on contract law. He is co-author (with Columbia Professor Robert E. Scott) of a leading casebook, Contract Law and Theory (fifth edition). Kraus and Scott also recently collaborated on the working paper “The Case Against Equity in American Contract Law.” Kraus has testified as an expert on contracts and the Uniform Commercial Code in both U.S. and foreign disputes, and he regularly consults on these subjects for attorneys around the world.

When Kraus joined the Law School faculty in 2012, he was named a Columbia University professor of philosophy. He teaches introductory and advanced contracts courses and has taught courses on the philosophy of contract law, legal theory, political philosophy, and philosophy of law. He is on the faculty of the new Columbia Law School Executive LL.M. in Global Business Law program.

Kraus served as the area organizer for the contracts and commercial law section of the American Law and Economics Association. He is a member of the American Law Institute, the Advisory Board of Legal Theory, the Association of American Law Schools, the American Philosophical Association, and the New York and Virginia bars.

                                                                                                     

Tamar Kricheli-Katz

The Buchmann Faculty of Law Tel Aviv University

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Tamar Kricheli Katz is an Associate Professor at Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law. She earned a PhD from Stanford’s Sociology Department, a JSM from Stanford Law School and an LL.B from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Kricheli-Katz teaches and researches in the fields of discrimination, inequality, empirical legal studies, contract law and law and society. Kricheli Katz has taught at UC Berkeley, Northwestern University and Stanford Law School. She is a recipient of the Alon Scholarship for outstanding junior faculty, the ISF research grant, and the NSF dissertation improvement grant. Prior to her graduate studies. Kricheli-Katz served as a law clerk and a legal advisor to Justice Theodor Or of the Israeli Supreme Court. Her publications include: “How many cents on the dollar? women and men in product markets” Science Advance 2:2 (2016) (with Tali Regev); “Choice-Based Discrimination: Labor-Force-Type Discrimination Against Gay Men, the Obese, and Mothers” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 10: 670-695 (2013); "He Paid, She Paid: Exploiting Israeli Courts' Rulings on Litigation Costs “ (with Talia Fisher, Tamar Kricheli Katz, Issi Rosen‐Zvi and Ted Eisenberg) Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 13: 536-561 (2016) ; Choice, Discrimination and the Motherhood Penalties” Law & Society Review 46: 557-587 (2012)

 

Thomas W. Merrill

Columbia Law School

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One of the most cited legal scholars in the United States, Thomas Merrill teaches and writes about administrative, constitutional, and property law, among other topics.

Merrill’s experience in the public and private sectors informs his pedagogy and research. After clerking for Chief Judge David L. Bazelon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court, Merrill was a deputy solicitor general of the U.S. Department of Justice and an associate at the firm of Sidley & Austin LLP, where he also served as counsel for more than 20 years.

He has written scholarly articles and several Supreme Court amicus briefs on when and how much weight courts should give administrative interpretations of law in different contexts. 

He has co-authored (with Henry E. Smith) the casebooks Property: Principles and Policies and The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Property. His seminal journal articles include “Optimal Standardization in the Law of Property: The Numerus Clausus Principle” on the role of  information costs in the structure of property law and “The Origins of the American Public Trust Doctrine: What Really Happened in Illinois Central” about the role of public property rights in the development of the Chicago lakefront. For the 125th anniversary celebration of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Merrill delivered the annual Hands Lecture, and he spoke on “Learned Hand and Statutory Interpretation: Theory and Practice.” He is currently serving as a co-reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Fourth) of Property and is finishing a book (with Joseph Kearney) on the history of the Chicago Lakefront, tentatively titled Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Right in Chicago (Cornell U. Press). 

In addition to Columbia, Merrill has served on the faculties of Northwestern Law School and Yale Law School. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

 

Edward R. Morrison

Columbia Law School

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Edward Morrison is an expert in bankruptcy law and law and economics, including the causes and consequences of insolvency, both consumer and corporate. 

Morrison’s scholarship has addressed corporate reorganization, consumer bankruptcy, the regulation of systemic market risk, and foreclosure and mortgage modification. His recent work studies patterns in inter-creditor agreements, valuation disputes in corporate bankruptcies, racial disparities in Chapter 13 bankruptcy filings, and the relationship between financial distress and mortality rates. 

Morrison teaches Contracts, Bankruptcy Law, and Corporate Finance. He is co-director of Columbia University’s Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy, and is faculty director of the Law School’s Executive LL.M. Program. 

He received the 2018 Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching, awarded by the graduating class of the Law School. 

Morrison’s research has been published in the American Economic Review, Journal of Law & Economics, and other leading peer-reviewed publications. His work has been cited by the bankruptcy bench and bar and received support from the National Science Foundation and Pew Charitable Trusts. Morrison and his co-author (Douglas Baird) received the 2012 John Wesley Steen Law Review Writing Prize from the American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI) for an article on the Dodd-Frank Act published in the ABI Law Review.

He is the editor, with William H.J. Hubbard, of the Journal of Legal Studies and a member of the National Bankruptcy Conference. He recently served as a director of the American Law & Economics Association, member of the Supreme Court’s Advisory Committee on Bankruptcy Rules, and associate editor of the American Law & Economics Review.

Morrison was the Paul H. and Theo Leffmann Professor of Commercial Law at the University of Chicago Law School from 2013 to 2014. He first began teaching at Columbia Law School in 2003 and from 2009 to 2012 was the Harvey R. Miller Professor of Law and Economics. Morrison clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court and for Judge Richard A. Posner of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

 

Eric Talley

Columbia Law School

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Eric Talley is an expert who works at the intersection of corporate law, governance, and finance. He also teaches and researches in the areas of mergers and acquisitions, quantitative methods, machine learning, contract and commercial law, alternative investments, game theory, and economic analysis of law. 

As a co-director of the Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership, Talley shapes research and programs focused on the future of corporate governance and performance. Talley is a frequent commentator in the national media, and he speaks regularly to corporate boards and regulators on issues pertaining to fiduciary duties, governance, and finance. 

Talley’s recent scholarship includes a data-based investigation of constitutional polarization in Congressional speech, written with David Pozen and Julian Nyarko, and an analysis of whether the end of disclosure-only settlements in merger objection lawsuits has benefited shareholders, written with Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci. His paper “Contracting Out of the Fiduciary Duty of Loyalty: An Empirical Analysis of Corporate Opportunity Waivers,’’ written with Gabriel Rauterberg and published in Columbia Law Review, was named one of the 10 best corporate and securities articles of 2017 by the Corporate Practice Commentator.

Before joining Columbia Law in 2015, Talley held permanent or visiting appointments at the University of California at Berkeley, University of Southern California, Caltech, University of Chicago, Harvard University, Georgetown University, RAND Graduate School, and Stanford University. In 2017, Talley was chosen by Columbia Law School’s graduating class to receive the Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

He serves on the board of directors of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies and was the co-president of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies.

 

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