Officers

Saul Levmore, President

William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School

Saul Levmore is the William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor at The University of Chicago Law School, where he was the Dean from 2001-2009. He has a J.D. and Ph.D. (Econ.) from Yale. He has taught and written about torts, corporations, corporate tax, copyright, comparative law, and commercial law, though his most recent work and teaching has tilted toward public choice and its intersections with law. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Recent work includes Aging Thoughtfully (2017) (with Martha Nussbaum); Interest Groups and the Durability of Law (in The Timing of Lawmaking (2017)); and articles about plea bargaining, customer discrimination, inequality, internality regulation, and (the problem with) incremental lawmaking.

Aaron Edlin, President

Richard W. Jennings Professor of Law and Professor of Economics and Co-Director, Law and Economics Program, University of California, Berkeley

Aaron Edlin specializes in antitrust economics and antitrust law, and is the co-founder of bepress. He holds the Richard Jennings Chair and professorships in both the economics department and law school at UC Berkeley and is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has published in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and numerous other venues. He is co-author with P. Areeda & L. Kaplow of Antitrust Analysis: Problems, Text, and Cases, one of the leading casebooks on antitrust. He served on the 2008 Obama Presidential campaign’s competition policy committee, and as Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Clinton White House covering industrial organization, regulation and antitrust. He has been a visiting professor or researcher at Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and Georgetown. He received tenure at UC Berkeley in 1997, his Ph.D. and J.D. from Stanford in 1993; and AB Summa Cum Laude from Princeton in 1988.

W. Bentley MacLeod,President

Sami Mnaymneh Professor of Economics at Columbia University
International Affairs Building, Room 1427A
Phone: 310-571-5083
bentley.macleod@columbia.edu

W. Bentley MacLeod is the Sami Mnaymneh Professor of Economics, Professor of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University and an affiliated faculty member at Columbia Law School. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the Society of Labor Economists. Previous positions include President of the Society of Institutional and Organizational Economics (2017-2018), director of the American Law and Economics Association (2008-2011), Codirector Program for Economics Research, Columbia (2006-2008), Program Director IZA Bonn (2004-2007), Director of the Western Economics Association (2003-2006), founding co-director of the Center for Law, Economics and Organization, USC (2000-2005), Leon Levy Foundation member at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton NJ. (2011-2012), Co-Editor of the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and Editor of the Journal of Labor Economics,

His scholarship focuses on understanding incentive contracts in complex environments and how they are designed to take into account the interplay between reputation effects, market competition, and social norms. Current projects include incentives and school choice, the economics of contract and tort law, the economics of performance pay and the economics of physician decision making.

Professor MacLeod holds a BA (with distinction) and an Msc in mathematics from Queen's University, Canada and a PhD in economics from the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Kathryn Zeiler, President

Professor of Law and Nancy Barton Scholar at Boston University School of Law

Professor Kathryn Zeiler a Professor of Law and Nancy Barton Scholar at Boston University School of Law. Prior to joining the BU Faculty, Professor Zeiler was Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center (2003–2015). She has held visiting professorships at Harvard Law School, NYU School of Law, Boston University School of Law, and Heidelberg University.

Professor Zeiler’s scholarship applies economic theory and empirical methods to the study of legal issues and research questions. Her main scholarly interests include the advancement of empirical legal studies, the importation of experimental economics results and behavioral economics theories into legal scholarship, the impact of state legislative tort damages caps on the price of medical malpractice insurance premiums, the impacts of communication and resolution programs implemented by hospitals to resolve medical malpractice claims, and the role of medical malpractice insurers in patient safety.

Professor Zeiler serves as a Fellow and current Chair of the board of directors for the Society of Empirical Legal Studies. She was elected to serve as the 2020-2021 Secretary-Treasurer for the American Law and Economics Association. She holds positions on the editorial board of the American Law and Economics Review and Behavioral Science and Policy. She has served as a member of the Max Planck Institute’s Scientific Review Board for Research on Collective Goods (2011–2018) and as a member of the board of directors of the American Law and Economics Association (2010–2012). She is a regular peer-reviewer for a number of economics journals and law and economics journals.

Her recent publications include Research Handbook on Behavioral Law and Economics (Edward Elgar Publishing), “What Explains Observed Reluctance to Trade?: A Comprehensive Literature Review” (in Research Handbook on Behavioral Law and Economics), “Mistaken About Mistakes” ( European Journal of Law and Economics), “Law, Technology, and Patient Safety” (DePaul Law Review), and “The Future of Empirical Legal Scholarship: Where Might We Go From Here?” (Journal of Legal Education).

James R. Hines Jr., Vice President

Richard A. Musgrave Collegiate Professor of Economics and L. Hart Wright Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan

James Hines teaches at the University of Michigan, where he is Richard A. Musgrave Collegiate Professor of Economics in the department of economics, L. Hart Wright Collegiate Professor of Law in the law school, codirector of the law & economics program at the law school, and research director of the business school’s Office of Tax Policy Research.

His research concerns various aspects of taxation. He holds a B.A. and M.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. from Harvard, all in economics. He taught at Princeton and Harvard prior to Michigan, and has held visiting appointments at Columbia University, the London School of Economics, the University of California-Berkeley, and Harvard Law School.

In 2017 he received the National Tax Association’s Daniel M. Holland Medal for lifetime achievement in the study of public finance. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, research director of the International Tax Policy Forum, a former co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics and the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and once, long ago, was an economist in the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Richard R.W. Brooks, Secretary-Treasurer

Emilie M. Bullowa Professor of Law
New York University School of Law

Richard R.W. Brooks is the Emilie M. Bullowa Professor of Law at New York University. He joined the law faculty at NYU in 2018, after holding the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professorship of Law at Yale Law School followed by the Charles Keller Beekman Professorship of Law at Columbia Law School. Brooks’ scholarly approach combines economics, game theory and legal analytical methods in the study of private law fields—such as contract, property, fiduciary and corporate law—and social organization more broadly.