The University of Illinois Law Review has just published a symposium issue in honor of my friend and former UIUC colleague Tom Ulen:
Professor Ulen received a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College, a master’s from St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University. He holds a Swanlund Chair, one of the highest endowed titles on the Urbana-Champaign campus, and is director of the College’s Program in Law and Economics. In addition, he is a research affiliate of the Environmental Council, a member of the Campus Honors faculty, and holds positions in the Department of Economics and the Institute for Government and Public Affairs.
Recently, Professor Ulen served as a visiting professor at the University of Bielefeld, and as the foreign chair in international and comparative law at the University of Ghent, Belgium. He has previously been a visiting professor in Belgium, Germany, Slovenia, and a Ford Foundation Professor in Shanghai, China.
As a scholar, Professor Ulen examines a variety of issues related to economics, legal scholarship, and legal education. He has recently completed work on two new books,Cognition, Rationality, and the Law (with Russell Korobkin; University of Chicago Press) and Foundations of Environmental Policy (with John B. Braden, Edward Elgar Publishers, Ltd.). His book, Law and Economics (with Robert Cooter), now in its fourth edition, has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Korean, French, and Russian.
A prolific writer and researcher, Professor Ulen has contributed four entries—on regulation generally, quantity regulation, price regulation, and quality regulation—for the Oxford Economic History of the United States and a chapter entitled, “The Limits of Law for Imperfectly Rational Actors” for Law and Irrational Behavior (Francesco Parisi, ed., University of Chicago Press, 2003). In addition, he is editing a book of legal humor, and expanding his Illinois Law Review article, “A Nobel Prize in Legal Science,” into a book.
Professor Ulen was a member of the founding board of directors of the American Law and Economics Association and has served as a member of the editorial board of several professional journals. He is also a co-organizer, with Professor Tom Ginsburg and Professor Richard McAdams, of the Midwest Law and Economics Association Annual Meeting at the College of Law.
As John Colombo observed of Tom in his introduction to the symposium:
When one uses the phrase law and economics, it almost automatically invokes the name of Richard Posner, and there is no denying Pos- ner’s importance to the field. But Tom has been equally instrumental, perhaps even more instrumental, in making law and economics the wide- spread and widely studied discipline that it is. The Cooter and Ulen text on law and economics, now in its fifth edition and translated into a dozen different languages (including Chinese—which if nothing else goes to show how well Tom understands market economics), made law and eco- nomics a teachable discipline. The text has spawned two generations of students who “grew up” learning the discipline and has provided a framework for future thought in the field. And it is not just this text; Tom has written dozens of articles in the field pushing the boundaries of Law and Economics forward while recognizing its limitations. He has been a tireless advocate for the discipline, seeding it at universities throughout the world, and he is a constant ambassador for it everywhere he goes.
There are several papers that will beof interest to regular readers of this blog, including:
Law and Economics in Japan
J. Mark Ramseyer | 2011 U. Ill. L. Rev. 1455
Download PDF | Abstract
The Future of Law and Finance After the Financial Crisis: New Perspectives on Regulation and Corporate Governance for Banks
Dirk Heremans & Katrien Bosquet | 2011 U. Ill. L. Rev. 1551
Download PDF | Abstract
Bail-Ins: Cyclical Effects of a Common Response to Financial Crises
Amitai Aviram | 2011 U. Ill. L. Rev. 1633
Download PDF | Abstract
All in all, a well-deserved tribute to a wonderful scholar and great person. I'm glad I'm not at Illinois anymore for a lot of reasons (weather being prominent among them) but Tom is one of the things I miss about the place a lot.
