About the Program
The John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics at the University of Virginia School of Law supports faculty and student interests and research relating to the economic analysis of legal issues. The program stimulates discussions and debate through conferences, workshops and lectures. It encourages student research through colloquia.
The John M. Olin Foundation Inc. was established in 1953 by John Merrill Olin (1892-1982) — inventor, industrialist, conservationist and philanthropist. Olin was committed to the preservation of the principles of political and economic liberty as they have been expressed in American thought, institutions and practice.
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...
This chapter studies political corruption and its many relationships to the law of democracy. It begins with bribery laws, which forbid officials from...
More
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...
Faculty Director(s)
Jason S. Johnston
Blaine T. Phillips Distinguished Professor in Environmental Law
Nicholas E. Chimicles Research Professor of Business Law and Regulation
Director, John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics
Research
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...
This chapter studies political corruption and its many relationships to the law of democracy. It begins with bribery laws, which forbid officials from...
More
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”...
Countries hit by unexpected crises often look to their overseas diasporas for assistance. Some countries have tapped into this generosity of their...
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...
Wenwen Ding
As China reformed its economy during the past 44 years, it experienced the fastest sustained expansion by a major economy in history, with an annual...
This Article considers one aspect of the ongoing debate about the moral limits of markets—namely, the purported harmful effects of market transactions...
More
This article analyses those hurdles, which are different for privately owned property such as oligarch yachts and state property such as bank deposits...
Resident Faculty
Resident Faculty
Corporate law and corporate finance
Contracts and professional responsibility
Law and economics, international relations, international law, immigration and refugee law, judging
Corporations, securities and real estate law; consumer financial markets
Law and economics, quantitative methods/statistics in the law
Legislation, election law, law and economics, and direct democracy
Tax law and policy, behavioral economics
Bankruptcy and consumer finance law
Law and economics, environmental liability
Environmental law and climate change, administrative law
Corporations, securities regulation, contracts
Civil litigation; law and psychology
Intellectual property, law and economics
Criminal law and criminal procedure
Workshops
The workshop program invites law and economics scholars from our own faculty and from other schools to deliver working drafts of their papers to the faculty and a small group of students at Virginia. Faculty and students attending are encouraged to read the paper prior to each workshop, which will be held in the Faculty Lounge on Tuesdays from 11:30 a.m.-12:50 p.m., unless otherwise indicated. After brief introductory remarks by the workshop guests, questions and discussion will follow for the remainder of the session. Lunch will be provided.
Full UVA Law Specialty Workshop Schedule
Spring 2024
Feb. 6
Jonathan Petkun (Duke University)
Feb. 20
Eric Talley (Columbia University)
March 12
Rebecca Goldstein (University of California, Berkeley)
March 26
Erik Hovenkamp (University of Southern California)
April 9
Talia Gillis (Columbia University)
April 23
Zhuang (John) Liu (University of Hong Kong)
Spring 2023
Feb. 7
Nuno Garoupa (George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School)
Feb. 21
Prasad Krishnamurthy (University of California, Berkeley, School of Law)
March 14
Holger Spamann (Harvard Law School)
March 28
Jill E. Fisch (University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School)
April 11
Jacob Goldin (University of Chicago Law School)
April 25
Paige Marta Skiba (Vanderbilt University Law School)
Fall 2022
Sept. 13
Doron Teichman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law)
Doron Teichman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law)
Sept. 27
Adriana Robertson (University of Chicago Law School)
Oct. 18
Sepehr Shahshahani (Fordham University School of Law)
Nov. 1
Adi Leibovitch (Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law)
Nov. 22
Florencia Marotta-Wurgler (New York University School of Law)
Dec. 6
Abhay Aneja (University of California, Berkeley, School of Law)
Spring 2022
Feb. 8
Maya Sen (Harvard)
Feb. 22
Yonathan Arbel (University of Alabama School of Law)
March 15
Philip Cook (Duke)
March 29
Jens Frankenreiter (Washington University in St. Louis School of Law)
April 12
Charles Crabtree (Dartmouth College) — Caplin Pavilion
April 26
Jonah Gelbach (UC Berkeley School of Law)
Fall 2021
Sept. 14
Adam Chilton (University of Chicago Law)
Sept. 28
Amalia R. Miller (UVA) and Melissa K. Spencer (University of Richmond)
Oct. 19
Ben Grunwald (Duke Law)
Nov. 2
Oren Bar-Gill (Harvard Law School)
Nov. 16
Weijia Rao (Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University)
Nov. 30
Zachary Liscow (Yale Law School)
Spring 2021
Online Via Zoom, 12:30 p.m.- 1:40 p.m.
Feb. 2
Catherine Tucker (MIT)
Feb. 16
Michael Simkovic (USC Gould School of Law) and Eric Allen (University of California, Riverside)
March 2
Netta Barak-Corren (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
March 23
Bocar Ba (UC Irvine)
April 6
Crystal Yang (Harvard Law)
April 20
Shayak Sarkar (UC Davis)
April 27
Katerina Linos (Berkeley)
Fall 2020
Online Via Zoom, 12:30 p.m.- 1:40 p.m.
Sept. 15
Michael Frakes (Duke Law)
Sept. 29
Elliott Ash (ETH Zurich)
Oct. 20
Jeremy McClane (Illinois College of Law)
Oct. 27
Caroline Cecot (Antonin Scalia Law School, Geoge Mason University)
Nov. 10
Melissa Wasserman (University of Texas at Austin School of Law)
Nov. 24
Jennifer Doleac (Texas A&M University)
Spring 2020
Jan. 21
David Hyman (Georgetown)
Feb. 11
Tatiana Homonoff (NYU Wagner)
Feb. 25
Tamar Kricheli-Katz (Tel Aviv)
March 24
Rachel Potter (UVA)
April 7
Jordan Neyland (GMU)
Fall 2019
Sept. 17
Ashley Langer (Arizona)
Sept. 24
Lewis Kornhauser (NYU)
Oct. 29
Yair Listokin (Yale)
Nov. 12
Rory VanLoo (Boston)
Nov. 19
Cindy Alexander (SEC)
Spring 2019
Feb. 12
Jonah Gelbach (Penn)
Feb. 26
Ken Ayotte (UC Berkeley)
March 26
Claudia Landeo (Alberta)
April 9
Anne Piehl (Rutgers)
April 23
Anne Meng (UVA)
Fall 2018
Sept. 25
Keith Hylton (Boston University)
Oct. 16
Lara Buchak (UC Berkeley)
Oct. 30
Daniel Sokol (Florida)
Nov. 13
Jens Frankenreiter (Max Planck Institute)
Nov. 27
Abby Wood (USC)
Spring 2018
Feb. 13
Paige Skiba (Vanderbilt)
Feb. 27
Anne Piehl (Rutgers)
March 20
Alison Morantz (Stanford)
April 3
Jake Gersen (Harvard)
April 10
Damon Jones (Chicago)
April 17
Bert Huang (Columbia)
Fall 2017
Sept. 12
Yehonatan Givati (Hebrew)
Sept. 26
Andrea Chandrasekhe (UC Davis)
Oct. 24
Jon Elster (Columbia)
Oct. 31
Gary Libecap (UCSB)
Nov. 7
Georg Vanberg (Duke)
Nov. 28
Mitchell Polinsky (Stanford)
Academic Conferences
The John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics conducts an academic conference each year that strives to push economic analysis beyond its traditional subject areas in law and broaden the appeal of the conference to other disciplines.
Law and Economics of Consumer Credit
Friday and Saturday, March 26-27, 2010
Contact: Joyce Holt
Full Schedule
Just two decades ago, little data existed even on the most rudimentary aspects of the criminal process, such as the numbers and types of convictions each year. In our fragmented criminal system, no central data gathering was conducted between the thousands of independent federal, state and local jurisdictions. Criminal justice data collection is still far from what should be desired. However, increasingly useful data is collected concerning each stage of the criminal process ranging from initial police stops, interrogations, guilty pleas, convictions, sentencing decisions, post-conviction review, to subsequent exonerations. A new wave of legal scholarship constructs new data sets and conducts more refined and ambitious empirical analysis. Criminal law scholarship also increasingly examines from a theoretical perspective the complex incentives surrounding criminality, prosecutorial charging, conviction, and sentencing.
The 2010 Olin Conference at the University of Virginia School of Law examines this growing and productive intersection of law and economics and criminal law. Scholars from economics, law, and criminology will examine different aspects of the criminal process. Papers analyze problems ranging from litigation costs, sentencing accuracy, racial profiling, deterrence, wrongful convictions, and judicial behavior. Participants will discuss the presented papers and more generally will explore what can be learned from the latest theoretical and empirical work analyzing criminal law from a law and economics perspective.
Law and Economics of Consumer Credit Law
Friday and Saturday, April 17-18, 2009
Contact: Joyce Holt
Full Schedule
After 50 years of legal and regulatory efforts to promote equality of opportunity in workplaces, one might expect social scientists to have reached consensus on what measures work to combat employment discrimination. But no such consensus exists. Social scientists offer many opinions on equal employment opportunity “best practices,” but surprisingly little evidence supports many of these opinions.
The key to advancing knowledge about how to combat workplace discrimination effectively is to determine which of the many competing assertions about the incidence, causes, and cures of workplace discrimination are supported by sound evidence. The 2009 Olin Conference at the University of Virginia will bring together leading scholars from economics, law, political science, psychology, sociology, and statistics to synthesize what we know about what works and what does not work in combating workplace discrimination and to discuss how we can most effectively learn what works and then communicate this information to organizations, courts, and policymakers.
Law and Economics of Consumer Credit
Friday and Saturday, February, 22-23, 2008
Contact: Joyce Holt
Full Schedule
Dramatic and controversial changes have occurred in both consumer lending markets and the laws that regulate these markets. This conference brings together scholars in the fields of law, economics, and finance to discuss some of the pressing issues that have emerged from the recent changes with an aim to better evaluate various legislative proposals that have been proposed in response. Papers cover a range of topics from payday lending to subprime mortgage to consumer bankruptcy.
Law and Finance
Friday and Saturday, March 23-24, 2007
Contact: Joyce Holt
Full Schedule
Recent advances in economic theory, as well as a growing body of empirical evidence, have highlighted the strong connections between the fields of law and finance. Today's financial economists rely heavily on the characteristics of legal institutions and contracts to explain the behavior of corporations and markets, while today's scholars in law and economics draw on financial theories and data to critically examine the organization and structure of law. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly common for law and finance scholars to work together in pursuing their research endeavors. This conference brings together top researchers in the fields of law and finance to discuss the topics that are of cutting-edge importance. The Conference is co-sponsored with the McIntire School of Commerce.
The Law and Economics of Organizations
Friday and Saturday, February 24-25, 2006
Contact: Joyce Holt
Full Schedule
Both legal and economic scholars have critically examined various aspects of modern organization since Coase's seminal article on the theory of the firm in 1937, including: an organization's economic and legal boundary, its hierarchical structure, incentive and promotion within an organization, and control within and across organizations. This conference aims to bring together scholars from the allied fields to examine the recent developments in the field and also to provide a more holistic view of the modern organization theory.
John M. Olin Conference on Real Options and the Law
Friday and Saturday, October 1-2, 2004
Contact: Joyce Holt
Full Schedule
Real options techniques are widely used in finance and economics to evaluate investment flexibility and to design multi-period strategies that maximize returns from flexibility. Legal scholars have begun to apply real options analysis to a range of legal contexts in which a party enjoys a discretionary right: for example, the right of an actor to commit a wrong (or breach a contract) and incur liability, the right of the innocent party to choose among remedies, the right to file a law suit and proceed through multi-staged litigation. This conference brings together scholars who have introduced options analysis to law in their prior writing, to examine a range of legal options.
John M. Olin Conference on Empirical Research in Corporate, Bankruptcy, and Securities Law
Friday and Saturday, February 27-28, 2004
Contact: Joyce Holt
Full Schedule
This conference assembles scholars from law school and business school faculties to discuss recent empirical work in the fields of corporate, bankruptcy, and securities law. This work is part of a broader trend towards empirical research in law and economics. The goal of the conference is to not only evaluate recent, notable findings, but also to promote greater dialogue between law and business faculties on topics of mutual interest and on empirical methodology. The papers covered a range of topics from insider trading and corporate governance in Southeast Asia to the governance structure of spinoffs.