Center for Public Law and Political Economy

About the Program

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 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.

Present Bias and Debt-Financed Durable Goods

Andrew Hayashi

Oren Bar-Gill

The Duty of Creditors to Cooperate in Sovereign Debt Workouts

G. Mitu Gulati

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...

Cause, Effect, and the Structure of the Social World

Megan T. Stevenson

This Essay is built around a central empirical claim: that most reforms and interventions in the criminal legal space are shown to have little lasting...

Political Corruption

Michael D. Gilbert

Deborah Hellman

This chapter studies political corruption and its many relationships to the law of democracy. It begins with bribery laws, which forbid officials from...

Contractual Howlers: A Russian Bond Case Study

G. Mitu Gulati

Robert Scott

Stephen Choi

Both theorists and courts commonly assume that high-dollar financial contracts between sophisticated parties are free of linguistic errors...

Does Cash Bail Deter Misconduct?

Megan T. Stevenson

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...

Faculty Director

Joshua Fischman

Professor of Law

Director, Center for Public Law and Political Economy

Resident Faculty

Kevin Cope

Law and economics, international relations, international law, immigration and refugee law, judging

Ph.D. candidate in political science, University of Michigan (expected 2019)
Created the first judicial ideology measure covering every Article III judge in the federal judiciary
Currently working to develop a method that could help international treaty negotiators achieve global-welfare-increasing cooperation
Clerked for three federal judges, including Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and practiced government enforcement litigation law in Washington, D.C., with Skadden, Arps

Joshua Fischman

Law and economics, quantitative methods/statistics in the law

Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
His research interests include law and economics, empirical methods, judicial decision-making and criminal sentencing

Michael D. Gilbert

Legislation, election law, law and economics, and direct democracy

Ph.D., Jurisprudence and Social Policy, University of California, Berkeley
Scholarship applies economic analysis to election law and constitutional design
Clerked for Judge William A. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
The first law professor to receive the UVA Student Council Distinguished Teaching Award

Andrew Hayashi

Tax law and policy, behavioral economics

Ph.D. in economics from University of California, Berkeley; M.Sc. in economics and philosophy from the London School of Economics
Hayashi's research on "tax salience" — meaning how visible a tax is — showed a correlation between higher salience and a higher number of appeals of property tax assessments
Serves as a McDonald Distinguished Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University

Jason S. Johnston

Law and economics, environmental liability

Ph.D. in economics, University of Michigan
Clerked for Gilbert S. Merritt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
Has served on the Board of Directors of the American Law and Economics Association, on the National Science Foundation’s Law and Social Science grant review panel, and on the Board of the Searle Civil Justice Institute
Former director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School
Johnston currently working on a book that critically analyzes the foundations of global warming law and policy.

Edmund W. Kitch

Corporate law and securities, industrial and intellectual property, economic regulation and history

Was special assistant to the solicitor general of the United States and executive director of the Civil Aeronautics Board Committee on Procedural Reform
Was a member of the Committee on Public-Private Sector Interactions in Vaccine Innovation of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences (1983-85)
Co-authored books include "Selected Statutes and International Agreements on Unfair Competition, Trademarks, Copyrights and Patents" and "Intellectual Property and Unfair Competition"

Michael A. Livermore

Environmental law and climate change, administrative law

Clerked for Judge Harry T. Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
Founding executive director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law
Co-authored "Retaking Rationality: How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and Our Health." The book became the foundation for a new approach public interest organizations could take in arguing for policies to protect the environment. (Faculty Q&A on related scholarship)

Julia D. Mahoney

Property, corporations and land conservation, nonprofit organizations

Has also taught at the University of Southern California Law School and the University of Chicago Law School
Scholarly articles include works on land preservation, eminent domain, health care reform and property rights in human biological materials
Practiced law at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz

Paul G. Mahoney

Corporations, securities regulation, contracts

Former Dean of the Law School (2008-16)
Clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and for Judge Ralph K. Winter, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Worked on legal reform projects in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and Nepal

Ruth Mason

State, international taxation and policy

National reporter for the United States to the 2008 IFA Congress on tax discrimination and the 2014 European Associate Tax Law Professors Congress on tax information exchange
Co-editor of Kluwer's "Series on International Taxation" and a member of the editorial board of the World Tax Journal
Mason's research focuses on comparative taxation, with an emphasis on EU tax law.
Amicus brief cited by U.S. Supreme Court in Comptroller of the Treasury of Maryland v. Wynne.
Has a four-part special report on EU state aids forthcoming in Tax Notes

John K. Setear

International law, including international environmental law and counterfactual diplomatic history

Clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and Judge Carl McGowan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
Was a policy analyst in the behavioral sciences department of the RAND Corp.
Setear’s academic interests include a short course on the law of baseball, and research into contractual “deals with the devil” in popular culture. (Story)

Paul B. Stephan

International law, business and economics

Clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. and for Judge Levin Campbell of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit
Has taught extensively abroad (Story)
Worked on a variety of projects involving law reform in former socialist states after the collapse of the Soviet Union, including Russia, Georgia, Ukraine, Albania and Slovakia on behalf of the U.S. Treasury, and in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan on behalf of the International Monetary Fund
Helped win case against Russian government's seizure of oil company (Story)
Is the coordinating reporter on the Fourth Restatement, providing guidance on foreign relations law (Story)

Megan T. Stevenson

Criminal law and criminal procedure

Economist and criminal justice scholar focused on criminal justice reform, including bail, algorithmic risk assessment, misdemeanors and juvenile justice
Research on bail cited extensively in a landmark federal civil rights decision, O’Donnell v. Harris, and in the media
Holds a Ph.D. in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California, Berkeley

Pierre-Hugues Verdier

International law and business, financial regulation

Practiced corporate and financial law with Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP in New York City
Is one of five Canadians to be awarded the Diploma of the Hague Academy of International Law since 1950
Writes on the international regulation of banking and securities markets, the law of foreign state immunity, and the application of international law in domestic courts around the world

J. H. Verkerke

Employment law and discrimination, contracts, contract theory, law and economics

M.Phil. in economics, Yale University
A pioneer in the use of technology in the classroom, won a $10,000 Hybrid Challenge Grant for Technology-Enhanced Teaching to convert his first-semester Contracts course into flipped classroom model of instruction (Story)
Author of an open-source Contracts casebook published by the CALI eLangdell Press. (Link)
Recent scholarship focuses on information-forcing rules in contracts and on vicarious liability for employee torts
In 2013, began an empirical study of law school teaching practices and how they affect student experiences and outcomes

Mila Versteeg

Comparative law and human rights

D.Phil. in socio-legal studies, Oxford University
Has written on the constitutions of nations, including the declining influence of the U.S. Constitution (Story)
Named a 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, which provided her with a $200,000 award to expand her research into the world's constitutions to better understand how constitutional rights are enforced in different countries. (More)
Gained human rights experience working at the U.N. Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute in Turin and at the Southern Africa Litigation Centre in Johannesburg

G. Mitu Gulati

Sovereign debt

Focuses on sovereign debt restructuring and contracts, and explores how to help countries in financial distress
Co-hosts the podcast “Clauses and Controversies,” is a contributor to the blog Creditslips.org, and serves as regional editor for the journal Capital Markets Law Journal
His work on contracts frequently addresses their often-unexpected nature, and he has questioned the assumption that parties fully understand the provisions and outcomes of deals
Has also written on “odious debts” — whether debts made by preceding regimes, such as that of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, should always be honored by future governments

David S. Law

Comparative and empirical study of public law, courts and legal texts

Internationally recognized expert in the comparative study of constitutional law, constitutional politics and judicial politics, and a pioneer in the application of empirical social science methods to the study of legal texts
Scholarship combines qualitative fieldwork on foreign judicial and constitutional systems, quantitative analysis of constitutions and treaties, and regional expertise on Asia
Ph.D. in political science, Stanford University; his work on courts and constitutions has been featured in media around the world and has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Romanian and Persian

Danielle K. Citron

Privacy, First Amendment, feminism and the law, civil rights, administrative law

Named a 2019 MacArthur Fellow for her work on cyberstalking and intimate privacy
Adviser to then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris on privacy issues and a member of her Cyber Exploitation Task Force (2014-16)
Vice president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting civil rights and liberties in a digital age
Gave TED talk “How Deepfakes Undermine Truth and Democracy” that has had over 1.9 million views
Clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Mary Johnson Lowe of the Southern District of New York

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., 2020-21 is coded (21), 2021-22 is coded (22) and 2022-23 is coded (23). (SC) stands for short course and (YR) stands for yearlong.

Capitalism and Socialism (22)
Comparative Constitutional Law (21,22,23)
Feminism and the Free Market (21,22)
International Law of Migration and Refugees (21)
Legislation and Regulation (21,22,23)
Monetary Constitution Seminar (22,23)
Regulatory Law and Policy (21,22,23)
Negotiating Constitutions (21)
Constitutional Law and Economics (23)
Judging (21)
Advanced Campaign Finance (22,23)
Rules (21,22)
Building the Rule of Law (21)
Regulation of the Political Process (21,22,23)
Climate Change Law and Policy (21)

Center for Public Law and Political Economy

Courses

Courses

Beyond the Classroom

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