Michael D. Gilbert
Michael Gilbert is vice dean of UVA Law. He teaches courses on election law, legislation, and law and economics, and his current research focuses misinformation, corruption, and the role of “prosocial” preferences such as empathy in law. In 2022, Oxford University Press published Gilbert’s book, Public Law and Economics. His research has appeared in multiple law reviews, peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, and he has lectured throughout the United States and around the world.
Gilbert has been a visiting professor at Panthéon-Assas University in Paris and Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires, among other places. He has won UVA’s All-University Teaching Award and the Student Council Distinguished Teaching Award. He was the inaugural director of UVA Law’s Center for Public Law and Political Economy, and he is a member of Convergencia, an international network of scholars studying economic and social regulations. He is a member of the UVA Democracy Initiative’s Corruption Lab for Ethics, Accountability, and the Rule of Law.
Prior to joining the faculty, Gilbert clerked for Judge William A. Fletcher on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He received his J.D. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as articles editor on the California Law Review and received multiple distinctions, including Olin Fellowships in Law and Economics and a grant from the National Science Foundation.
This chapter studies political corruption and its many relationships to the law of democracy. It begins with bribery laws, which forbid officials from...