LAW AND ECONOMICS WORKSHOP

presents

Professor Thomas Ulen
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The Role of Law in Economic Growth and Development

Tuesday, November 9, 2010
4:10 - 2:00 PM
Solarium (Room FA2) - Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park

 

 I begin with an overview of the statistics that characterize modern economic growth and of the various theories that have been proposed to explain those statistics.  Among those theories, the one that encompasses law and seems to hold the most promise of providing an explanation of successful growth and a guide to policies for fostering and sustaining growth is the one that stresses the importance of growth-enhancing institutions.  However, neither that theory nor any of the others surveyed here adequately explains growth.  I argue that this view of law and other institutions as the “golden key” to successful economic growth is misplaced for four reasons: it ignores the existence of well-functioning substitutes for law, such as social norms; it ignores the multitude of different methods of achieving sustained modern growth; it ignores the remarkable success of China; and it places too small a value on the role of political factors—especially of political courage—in fostering growth and development.  I conclude that our ability to specify the conditions under which sustained modern economic growth will take root are limited—but not nonexistent.

 

I received my bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College in 1968 and then served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Seoul, Korea, from 1968 to 1970.  I studied PPE (philosophy, politics, and economics) at St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, from 1970 to 1972.  Next, I went to Stanford, from which I received a Ph.D. in economics in 1979.  I joined the faculty of the Department of Economics at the University of Illinois in 1977.  The field of law and economics was so new in 1980 that it did not exist as a course in graduate school.  I discovered law and economics from another new professor at Illinois, Dan Farber.  I was so taken by the topic that I developed a proposal for a new undergraduate course in the subject in 1981.  During 1981-1982 I was a visiting professor at the Law School and Department of Economics at the University of California, Davis.  When I returned to the University of Illinois, I taught law and economics as a visitor in the College of Law and continued to teach in the Department of Economics.  I became affiliated with the Institute of Government and Public Affairs in 1987 and officially joined the faculty of the College of Law in 1989.  I was a visiting professor at Fudan University in Shanghai in Spring, 1989, and have also taught at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium, the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, the University of Bielefeld, Germany, the University of Hamburg, the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, the University of Ghent (where I was the Foreign Chair of Law in 2002-2003), and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

 

 

My scholarly interests have been in the economic analysis of legal rules and institutions.  My textbook with Robert D. Cooter, Law and Economics, soon to appear in its sixth edition, has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese, and other languages.  I have recently been working on behavioral law and economics (the survey article with Russell Korobkin of UCLA Law School is the most frequently cited article of the first decade of this century) and have a book on that subject forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press with Russell Korobkin.  Two colleagues and I published Empirical Methods in Law in December, 2009.  Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago Law School and I are completing a text on law and economic development.

 

I was involved in the founding of the American Law and Economics Association and hosted the association’s inaugural meeting, held at the University of Illinois College of Law in May, 1991.  During the 2000-2001 academic year I served as Chair of the UIUC Chancellor Search Committee and co-chair of the Dean Search Committee at the law school in 2008-2009.

 

In March, 2003, I was appointed a Swanlund Chair at UIUC.  I received an honorary doctorate from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) in 2007.  I retired from the University of Illinois on August 1, 2010, and am serving as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Maryland School of Law during the 2010-2011 academic year. 

 

For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.