About
The University of Virginia has a renowned history in political economy. Beginning in the 1950s, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock applied economics to political processes and wrote “The Calculus of Consent,” a classic study of constitutional democracy. In 1960, Ronald Coase wrote “The Problem of Social Cost,” a foundational paper on economics and law. Together these UVA professors won two Nobel Prizes, founded academic fields, and influenced thousands of scholars and students.
The Center for Public Law and Political Economy continues this tradition. UVA Law School features a large and distinguished group of scholars who apply insights from economics and political science to the study of public law, including constitutional law, election law, regulation and tax. The center unites and supports their scholarship. The center also provides students, researchers and practitioners with opportunities to connect with these ideas through workshops, conferences and other events.
Large language models (LLMs) now perform extremely well on many natural language processing tasks. Their ability to convert legal texts to data may...
Countries hit by unexpected crises often look to their overseas diasporas for assistance. Some countries have tapped into this generosity of their...
This chapter studies political corruption and its many relationships to the law of democracy. It begins with bribery laws, which forbid officials from...
Oren Bar-Gill
There is concern that present-biased agents incur too much debt because of its deferred costs – concern that has influenced regulation of consumer...
Lee C. Buchheit
Lenders are perfectly free to decide for themselves whether, when, how, to whom and on what terms they will extend credit to a sovereign borrower. But...
Yonathan A. Arbel
False information causes harm, threatening individuals, groups, and society. Many people struggle to judge the veracity of the information around them...
Faculty Director(s)
Joshua Fischman
Albert Clark Tate, Jr., Professor of Law
Director, Center for Public Law and Political Economy
Research
Large language models (LLMs) now perform extremely well on many natural language processing tasks. Their ability to convert legal texts to data may...
Countries hit by unexpected crises often look to their overseas diasporas for assistance. Some countries have tapped into this generosity of their...
This chapter studies political corruption and its many relationships to the law of democracy. It begins with bribery laws, which forbid officials from...
Oren Bar-Gill
There is concern that present-biased agents incur too much debt because of its deferred costs – concern that has influenced regulation of consumer...
Lee C. Buchheit
Lenders are perfectly free to decide for themselves whether, when, how, to whom and on what terms they will extend credit to a sovereign borrower. But...
Yonathan A. Arbel
False information causes harm, threatening individuals, groups, and society. Many people struggle to judge the veracity of the information around them...
Many analyses of law take an unsentimental, perhaps even cynical view of regulated actors. On this view, law is a necessity borne of people’s selfish...
This article examines the impact of Greece retroactively, via legislation, changing the terms in hundreds of billions of euros worth of Greek...
Income inequality is a national preoccupation, and the public’s imagination is captured by the astronomical incomes of Valley tech billionaires and...
There is a live debate going on over whether antitrust should take a broader view of the economics of market concentration. When antitrust reformers...
The SEC mandates that public companies assess new information that changes the risks that they face and disclose these if there has been a “material”...
This paper describes the response of George Washington's administration to a plea for emergency war financing from French colonists who were trying to...
The conventional view is that standardized boilerplate terms represent an optimal contractual solution to the contracting problems facing parties in...
Tara Chowdhury
Faith Chudkowski
Amanda Gray Dixon
...Consequential damages have been a cornerstone of contract doctrine since the broken crankshaft in Hadley v. Baxendale. And the Hadley rule is one of...
In this article, we examine the relations between risk, the choice of foreign or local contract terms (parameters), and maturity in the sovereign debt...
This chapter examines several ways that the United States takes advantage of international law’s permissiveness and ambiguity to extend its criminal...
Both theorists and courts commonly assume that high-dollar financial contracts between sophisticated parties are free of linguistic errors...
Aurelie Ouss
Courts routinely use low cash bail as a financial incentive to ensure that released defendants appear in court and abstain from crime. This can create...
June Carbone
The pathway to stable and secure middle-class status involves two elements: the ability to postpone family formation to facilitate human capital...
More
We examine the legal terms in the market for green bonds, debt instruments in which proceeds are earmarked, directly or indirectly, for projects with...
The past few years have witnessed a particular accusation leveled repeatedly and loudly at the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority: that...
Michael S. Knoll
Courts and commentators have long understood dormant Commerce Clause doctrine to contain two types of cases: discrimination and undue burdens. This...
A key question in the academic and policy debates over the optimal architecture for sovereign debt has long been whether sovereigns should be given...
In this article, Mason reviews the advocate general opinion in the case against Ireland for granting illegal state aid to Apple. Advocate General...
This Article is built around a central empirical claim: most reforms and interventions in the criminal legal space are shown to have little lasting...
We examine the legal terms in the market for green bonds, debt instruments in which proceeds are earmarked, directly or indirectly, for projects with...
Lee C. Buchheit
Sovereign borrowers needing debt relief in the twenty-first century must face three sets of creditors—commercial lenders (usually bondholders)...
Lee C. Buchheit
All sovereign debt restructurings are inherently messy, expensive, exasperating, time-consuming and contentious. These are the familiar pathologies in...
We review the state of the sovereign debt literature and point out that the canonical model of sovereign debt cannot be easily reconciled with several...
Resident Faculty
Resident Faculty
Privacy, First Amendment, feminism and the law, civil rights, administrative law
Law and economics, international relations, international law, immigration and refugee law, judging
Law and economics, quantitative methods/statistics in the law
Legislation, election law, law and economics, and direct democracy
Energy law, environmental law, administrative law
Sovereign debt
Tax law and policy, behavioral economics
Empirical analysis of corporate and securities law and the structure of financial markets
Law and economics, environmental liability
Corporate law and securities, industrial and intellectual property, economic regulation and history
Comparative and empirical study of public law, courts and legal texts
Environmental law and climate change, administrative law
Property, corporations and land conservation, nonprofit organizations
Corporations, securities regulation, contracts
State, international taxation and policy
International law, including international environmental law and counterfactual diplomatic history
International law, business and economics
Criminal law and criminal procedure
International law and business, banking and securities regulation
Employment law and discrimination, contracts, contract theory, law and economics
Comparative law and human rights
Courses
Many core courses at the Law School integrate concepts from political economy into the study of public law. Examples include Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, International Law, Legislation, and State and Local Government Law. In addition, the Law School offers many specialized courses that explore connections between law and political economy in greater depth. The following is a list of courses offered during the current and two previous academic years. Numbers in parentheses indicate which academic year(s) the courses were offered, i.e., 2021-22 is coded (22), 2022-23 is coded (23) and 2023-24 is coded (24). (SC) stands for short course and (YR) stands for yearlong.
Capitalism and Socialism (22)
Comparative Constitutional Law (22,23,24)
Feminism and the Free Market (22,24)
Legislation and Regulation (22,23)
Monetary Constitution Seminar (22,23,24)
Regulatory Law and Policy (22,23)
Constitutional Law and Economics (23,24)
Advanced Campaign Finance (22)
Rules (22,24)
Regulation of the Political Process (22,23)
University of Virginia School of Law Vice Dean Michael D. Gilbert’s new co-authored textbook applies economic analysis to the field of public law. The publisher, Oxford University Press, has made the book available for free online.
University of Virginia law professor Mitu Gulati looks at the tragic history of Haiti’s 19th-century “odious debt” to France after islanders won their freedom from slavery, and discusses whether Haiti could recoup what it lost.
Beyond the Classroom
The Law School offers many opportunities for students to explore public law and political economy. The Law and Economics Workshop hosts researchers from around the world, many of whom concentrate on public law topics. The Law and Economics Research Paper Series features work by UVA Law faculty, including many papers that draw on social science to study public law. Faculty affiliated with the center regularly supervise independent studies that result in published student notes.
Related Centers
UVA Law supports other programs and centers whose activities overlap with public law and political economy, including the Karsh Center for Law and Democracy, the John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics, the Virginia Center for Tax Law, and the Center for International & Comparative Law. Beyond the Law School, UVA is home to the Democracy Initiative, a campus-wide program focused on studying and advancing democracy worldwide. The Democracy Initiative supports the Corruption Lab on Ethics, Accountability, and the Rule of Law.
Student Organizations
A thriving community of student organizations hosts events and publishes scholarship at the intersection of public law and political economy. These include the American Constitution Society, the Federalist Society, the J.B. Moore Society of International Law, Common Law Grounds, the Journal of Law & Politics, and the Virginia Journal of Social Policy & the Law.
Professor Joshua Fischman of the University of Virginia School of Law offers insights on the possible implications of the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Ticketmaster.
UVA Law professor John Monahan discusses how predicting violence became a concern for courtrooms and mental health practices nationwide, and developed alongside his own career.
News
October 24, 2024
Professor Emeritus Charles J. Goetz, an economist at the University of Virginia School of Law who reshaped the field of contracts, died Oct. 16. He was 85.
October 2, 2024
University of Virginia School of Law professor Edwin Hu’s co-authored paper analyzing how shareholders use customized proxy advice won the Northern Finance Association’s Best Paper Award in Corporate Finance.
July 18, 2024
Members of the University of Virginia School of Law community have recently been singled out for excellence. Among the accolades, UVA was ranked No. 1 in Above the Law’s annual law school rankings.
July 17, 2024
New courses offered this fall at the University of Virginia School of Law include Artificial Intelligence and Democracy, International Settlement of Disputes, and Single People and the Law.
June 18, 2024
Professor Joshua Fischman of the University of Virginia School of Law offers insights on the possible implications of the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Ticketmaster.
May 31, 2024
Professor Edwin “Eddy” Hu, an empirical law and finance expert, will join the University of Virginia School of Law faculty this summer.
October 2, 2023
Members of the University of Virginia School of Law community have recently been singled out for excellence. Among the accolades, Professor Michael Livermore will be in Paris this school year through a fellowship dedicated to addressing looming global challenges.
May 31, 2023
University of Virginia School of Law professor Megan Stevenson, an economist and criminal justice scholar, has won the inaugural Donald M. Ephraim Prize in Law and Economics.
March 9, 2023
Social scientist Susan S. Silbey discusses her life’s work on why people and organizations do and don’t obey the law for the latest episode of “Common Law,” a podcast of the University of Virginia School of Law.
February 23, 2023
A federal agency responsible for reviewing requests to build interstate natural gas pipelines almost always approves them. Professor Alison Gocke explores the reasons why on the latest episode of “Common Law,” a podcast of the University of Virginia School of Law.
February 7, 2023
Experts at a symposium at the University of Virginia School of Law will explore how abortion rights advocates may reclaim reproductive rights through the democratic process after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.
January 5, 2023
Professors Douglas Laycock and Bertrall Ross of the University of Virginia School of Law are being recognized by the Association of American Law Schools for their scholarship.
December 19, 2022
Stories from the past year highlight 10 changemaking moments at the University of Virginia School of Law launched by community members to serve the greater good.
December 5, 2022
Professor Michael Livermore, an expert in computational legal analysis at the University of Virginia School of Law, discusses the future of artificial intelligence in the legal industry.
October 25, 2022
Members of the University of Virginia School of Law community have recently been singled out for excellence. Among the accolades, Spencer Haydary ’23 was named a 2022 John A. Herring Scholar by the Serpentine Society and seven faculty members cracked the top 75 among the most-cited law professors in the U.S.
October 14, 2022
The 16th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies will be held at the University of Virginia School of Law from Nov. 3-5. Anne-Marie Slaughter, the CEO of New America and a former dean at Princeton, will deliver the keynote address.
October 12, 2022
University of Virginia School of Law professor Bertrall Ross’ paper “Voter Data, Democratic Inequality, and the Risk of Political Violence” has sparked a pro-democracy project to widen voter outreach efforts.
September 29, 2022
The University of Virginia School of Law has named new faculty directors to lead some of the 23 centers and programs that shape the school’s intellectual life.
September 22, 2022
University of Virginia School of Law Vice Dean Michael D. Gilbert’s new co-authored textbook applies economic analysis to the field of public law. The publisher, Oxford University Press, has made the book available for free online.
June 13, 2022
Professor Megan Stevenson of the University of Virginia School of Law and her team have received a $200,000 grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to study the long-term effects of incarceration.
University of Virginia School of Law professor Megan Stevenson, an economist and criminal justice scholar, has won the inaugural Donald M. Ephraim Prize in Law and Economics.
University of California, Berkeley professor Jennifer Skeem discusses empirical guidance for shifting programs and practices to improve outcomes for high-need, high-risk populations involved in the justice system. Skeem’s talk was the 18th P. Browning Hoffman Memorial Lecture in Law and Psychiatry, sponsored by the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy, and the University’s schools of Law and Medicine. UVA Law professors Richard Bonnie ’69 and John Monahan introduce the event.