Michigan State Law Review Visionary Scholar Archives
In 2018, the Michigan State Law Review launched the Visionary Scholar Series, which aims to recognize individuals who have made significant contributions to their respective fields of law through meaningful scholarship. Once per publication year, we honor a single legal scholar who has had a profound impact on a field of law by publishing their work with a special designation.
Eric A. Posner
U. of Chicago Law Professor | 2024
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Eric Posner is the Kirkland and Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. His research interests include antitrust law, financial regulation, international law, and constitutional law. Professor Posner is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Law Institute.
His books include How Antitrust Failed Workers (Oxford, 2021); The Demagogue’s Playbook (All Points Books, 2020); Radical Markets (Princeton, 2018) (with Glen Weyl); Last Resort: The Financial Crisis and the Future of Bailouts (University of Chicago Press, 2018); The Twilight of International Human Rights (Oxford, 2014); Economic Foundations of International Law (with Alan Sykes) (Harvard, 2013); Contract Law and Theory (Aspen, 2011); The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic (with Adrian Vermeule) (Oxford, 2011); Climate Change Justice (with David Weisbach) (Princeton, 2010); The Perils of Global Legalism (Chicago, 2009); Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty and the Courts (with Adrian Vermeule) (Oxford, 2007); New Foundations of Cost-Benefit Analysis (with Matthew Adler) (Harvard, 2006); The Limits of International Law (with Jack Goldsmith) (Oxford, 2005); Law and Social Norms (Harvard, 2000); Chicago Lectures in Law and Economics (editor) (Foundation, 2000); and Cost-Benefit Analysis: Legal, Economic, and Philosophical Perspectives (editor, with Matthew Adler) (University of Chicago, 2001).
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Lawrence B. Solum
U.V.A. Law Professor | 2023
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Lawrence B. Solum is an internationally recognized legal theorist who works in constitutional theory, procedure, and the philosophy of law. Solum contributes to debates in constitutional theory and normative legal theory. He is especially interested in the intersection of law with the philosophy of language and with moral and political philosophy. His series of articles on constitutional originalism have shaped contemporary thinking about the great debate between originalism and constitutional theory. Solum’s original theory of the fundamental nature and purpose of law, “Virtue Jurisprudence,” has been debated and discussed in Asia, Europe, and North America. He also works on problems of law and technology, including internet governance, copyright policy, and patent law. His pathbreaking article, “Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligences,” published in the early 1990s, is widely acknowledged as far ahead of its time.
Solum received his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and received his B.A. with highest departmental honors in philosophy from the University of California at Los Angeles. While at Harvard, he served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. After graduation, he worked for the law firm of Cravath, Swaine, and Moore in New York, and then clerked for Judge William A. Norris of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Prior to joining the UVA Law faculty in 2020, he was a member of the faculty at Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Illinois, the University of San Diego, Loyola Marymount University, and visited at Boston University and the University of Southern California. He regularly teaches Civil Procedure and Constitutional Law. His other teaching includes seminars in constitutional theory and the philosophy of law, as well as courses in conflict of laws, federal courts, intellectual property, and internet law and governance.
Solum’s books include “Constitutional Theory Arguments and Perspectives,” “Constitutional Originalism,” “法理词典 (The Legal Theory Lexicon),” “Virtue Jurisprudence,” “Moore’s Federal Practice” and “Destruction of Evidence.” He has published more than 80 articles in law reviews and philosophy journals.
He is also the editor of Legal Theory Blog, an influential blog that focuses on developments in contemporary normative and positive legal theory.
Solum has spoken to dozens of law faculties, including those at Arizona State University, Boston University, Columbia University, Fordham University, and Notre Dame, among others. He has also participated in conferences, symposia, and programs sponsored by Cardozo Law School, Chicago-Kent Law School, DePaul Law School, and Harvard Law School, among others.
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Akhil Amar
Yale Law Professor | 2022
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Akhil Amar is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University where he teaches constitutional law in both Yale College and Yale Law School. After graduating from Yale College, summa cum laude, in 1980 and from Yale Law School in 1984, and clerking for then Judge (now Justice) Stephen Breyer, Amar joined the Yale faculty in 1985 at the age of 26. His work has won awards from both the American Bar Association and the Federalist Society and he has been cited by Supreme Court justices across the spectrum in more than 40 cases—tops in his generation, and indeed among all active scholars. He regularly testifies before Congress at the invitation of both parties; and in surveys of judicial citations and/or scholarly citations, he invariably ranks among America’s five most-cited mid-career legal scholars.
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of the American Bar Foundation’s Outstanding Scholar Award. In 2008 he received the DeVane Medal—Yale’s highest award for teaching excellence. He has written widely for popular publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and The Atlantic. He was an informal consultant to the popular TV show, The West Wing, and his constitutional scholarship has been showcased on The Colbert Report, The O’Reilly Factor, and Constitution USA with Peter Sagal. He is the author of dozens of law review articles and several books, including “The Constitution and Criminal Procedure”(1997), “The Bill of Rights” (1998—winner of the Yale University Press Governors’ Award), “America’s Constitution” (2005—winner of the ABA’s Silver Gavel Award), “America’s Unwritten Constitution” (2012—named one of the year’s 100 best nonfiction books by The Washington Post), “The Law of the Land” (2015), and “The Constitution Today” (2016—named one of the year’s top ten nonfiction books by Time magazine).
In 2017, he received the Howard Lamar Award for outstanding service to Yale alumni. He is Yale’s only currently active professor to have won the University’s unofficial triple crown—the Sterling Chair for scholarship, the DeVane Medal for teaching, and the Lamar Award for alumni service.
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Eduardo M. Peñalver
Cornell Dean & Law Professor | 2021
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Eduardo M. Peñalver is the Allan R. Tessler Dean and Professor of Law. He became Cornell Law School's 16th Dean on July 1, 2014 and the first Latino dean of an Ivy League law school. Dean Peñalver most recently served as the John P. Wilson Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School.
He received his B.A. from Cornell University and his law degree from Yale Law School. Between college and law school, he studied philosophy and theology as a Rhodes Scholar at Oriel College, Oxford. Upon completing law school, Dean Peñalver clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and at the Supreme Court for Justice John Paul Stevens.
Dean Peñalver’s scholarship focuses on property and land use, as well as law and religion. His work explores the way in which the law mediates the interests of individuals and communities. His writing on property has appeared in numerous leading law journals. His book, Property Outlaws (co-authored with Sonia Katyal), published by Yale University Press in February 2010, explores the vital role of disobedience within the evolution of property law. His most recent book, An Introduction to Property Theory (co-authored with Gregory Alexander), was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011.
Dean Peñalver previously taught at Cornell Law School (2006-2012) and at Fordham Law School (2003-2006). He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and Yale Law School.
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Forthcoming.
Daniel Markovits
Yale Law Professor | 2020
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Daniel Markovits is Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at Yale Law School and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Private Law.
Markovits works in the philosophical foundations of private law, moral and political philosophy, and behavioral economics. He publishes in a range of disciplines, including in Science, The American Economic Review, and The Yale Law Journal.
Markovits’s current book, The Meritocracy Trap (forthcoming, Penguin Press), places meritocracy at the center of rising economic inequality and social and political dysfunction. The book takes up the law, economics, and politics of human capital to identify the mechanisms through which meritocracy breeds inequality and to expose the burdens that meritocratic inequality imposes on all who fall within meritocracy’s orbit.
After earning a B.A. in Mathematics, summa cum laude from Yale University, Markovits received a British Marshall Scholarship to study in England, where he was awarded an M.Sc. in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the L.S.E. and a B.Phil. and D.Phil. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford. Markovits then returned to Yale to study law and, after clerking for the Honorable Guido Calabresi, joined the faculty at Yale.
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Robert Post
Yale Law Professor | 2019
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Robert Post is a Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He served as the School's 16th dean from 2009 until 2017. Before coming to Yale, he taught at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.
Post specializes in constitutional law, with a particular emphasis on the First Amendment. He is also a legal historian who is currently writing Volume X of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States, which will cover the period 1921-30 when William Howard Taft was Chief Justice. Post has written and edited numerous books, including Citizens Divided: A Constitutional Theory of Campaign Finance Reform (2014), which was originally delivered as the Tanner Lectures at Harvard in 2013; Democracy, Expertise, Academic Freedom: A First Amendment Jurisprudence for the Modern State (2012), which was originally delivered as the Rosenthal Lectures at Northwestern University; For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom (with Matthew M. Finkin, 2009), which has become the standard reference for the meaning of academic freedom in the United States; and Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law (2001), which was original delivered as the Brennan Lectures at Berkeley.
Post publishes regularly in legal journals and other publications; exemplary articles and chapters include “Data Privacy and Dignitary Privacy: Google Spain, The Right to be Forgotten, and the Construction of the Public Sphere” (Duke Law Journal, 2018); “The Politics of Religion: Democracy and the Conscience Wars,” in The Conscience Wars: Rethinking the Balance between Religion, Identity, and Equality (Susanna Mancini and Michel Rosenfeld, eds., Cambridge University Press 2018); “Theorizing Disagreement: Reconceiving the Relationship Between Law and Politics” (California Law Review, 2010); “Roe Rage: Democratic Constitutionalism and Backlash” (with Reva Siegel, Harvard Civil-Rights Civil-Liberties Law Review, 2007); “Federalism, Positive Law, and the Emergence of the American Administrative State: Prohibition in the Taft Court Era” (William & Mary Law Review, 2006); “Foreword: Fashioning the Legal Constitution: Culture, Courts, and Law” (Harvard Law Review, 2003); and “Subsidized Speech” (Yale Law Journal, 1996).
Post is a member of the American Law Institute and a fellow of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Richard L. Revesz
N.Y.U. Law Professor | 2018
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Richard L. Revesz is the director of the American Law Institute and a law professor and dean emeritus at the New York University School of Law. Revesz is one of the nation’s leading voices in the fields of environmental and regulatory law and policy. His work focuses on the use of cost-benefit analysis in administrative regulation, federalism and environmental regulation, design of liability regimes for environmental protection, and positive political economy analysis of environmental regulation. His book Retaking Rationality: How Cost-Benefit Analysis Can Better Protect the Environment and Our Health (with Michael Livermore ’06, 2008) contends that the economic analysis of law can be used to support a more protective approach to environmental and health policy. In 2008, Revesz co-founded the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU School of Law to advocate for regulatory reform before courts, legislatures, and agencies, and to contribute original scholarly research in the environmental and health-and-safety areas. Revesz received a BS summa cum laude from Princeton University, an MS in civil engineering from MIT, and a JD from Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. After judicial clerkships with Chief Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice Thurgood Marshall of the US Supreme Court, Revesz joined the NYU School of Law faculty in 1985 and served as dean from 2002 to 2013. Revesz is the director of the American Law Institute, the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and otherwise improve the law. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States.
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