Current Legal Issues
Tom Ulen, a distinguished professor of law and economics, will focus on a current legal issue of the group’s choice. Topics he is prepared to address include the following:

• The changing nature of the U.S. economy – what’s left for public policy to accomplish?
• What’s right and wrong with the legal profession today?
• The political and legal issues of physician-assisted suicide
• The federal government’s antitrust actions against Microsoft
• The reform of tort (civil) law – why and how?
• The economics of the legal profession
• What we’re learning about the nature of human reasoning and how the law should take account of it

• The crisis in Argentina

About the Speaker
Professor Tom Ulen received a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College, a master’s degree from St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and a doctorate in economics from Stanford University. He holds a Swanlund Chair, one of the highest endowed titles on the Urbana-Champaign campus, and is director of the College of Law’s Program in Law and Economics. In addition, Ulen is a research affiliate of the Environmental Council and a member of the Campus Honors faculty. He also holds positions in the Department of Economics and the Institute for Government and Public Affairs.

Recently, Ulen served as a visiting professor at Bielefeld University and as the foreign chairman in international and comparative law at the University of Ghent, Belgium. He has previously been a visiting professor in Belgium, Germany and Slovenia and a Ford Foundation professor in Shanghai, China.

As a scholar, Ulen examines a variety of issues related to economics, legal scholarship and legal education. He has recently completed work on two new books, “Cognition, Rationality and the Law” (with Russell Korobkin, University of Chicago Press) and “Foundations of Environmental Policy” (with John B. Braden, Edward Elgar Publishers Ltd.). His book, “Law and Economics” (with Robert Cooter, Pearson/AddisonWesley), now in its fourth edition, has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Korean, French and Russian.

A prolific writer and researcher, Ulen has contributed four entries – on regulation generally, quantity regulation, price regulation and quality regulation – for the Oxford Economic History of the United States and a chapter titled “The Limits of Law for Imperfectly Rational Actors” for “Law and Economics of Irrational Behavior” (Francesco Parisi, ed., University of Chicago Press, 2003). In addition, he is editing a book of legal humor and expanding his Illinois Law Review article, “A Nobel Prize in Legal Science,” into a book.