Featured Faculty: Dan B. Kelly
Associate Professor of Law
Robert and Marion Short Scholar
Daniel B. Kelly is a promising scholar in property law and law and economics and has taken great strides to assist in developing the University’s law-and-economics curriculum.
Professor Kelly’s teaching and research interests include property, land use planning, and trusts and estates. His scholarly work has focused primarily on the economic analysis of property law, especially the use of eminent domain, secret buying agents, and other mechanisms for circumventing holdouts and promoting economic development. To this end, he has published articles in the Cornell Law Review, Harvard Law Review Forum, and Supreme Court Economic Review and has a chapter forthcoming in the Research Handbook on the Economic Analysis of Property Law (Edward Elgar). His current projects explore (i) the problem of “strategic spillovers,” situations in which parties purposely harm (or threaten to harm) others to extract payments in exchange for desisting; (ii) the use of tradable environmental allowances in mitigating collective action problems, and (iii) the role of information costs in trust law.
“The economic analysis of law is significant because it is an analytically rigorous way of analyzing legal rules and legal decisions,” says Kelly. “Understanding how individuals and firms respond to incentives, whether it is a criminal penalty or a tax on pollution, is an important aspect of designing the best possible legal system and thereby promoting the common good.”
At present, Professor Kelly also is collaborating with colleague Margaret Brinig to launch the Notre Dame Law and Economics Program, an interdisciplinary program that will commence in fall 2010. The program will feature a Law and Economics seminar, a workshop-style class in which students and interested faculty will investigate issues at the intersection of law and economics, law and the social sciences, and law and business. Featuring speakers from various departments at Notre Dame, including the law school, economics department, and business school, as well as speakers from other law schools and universities, the seminar will provide students with an opportunity to research and discuss seminal scholarship by leading academics while simultaneously earning course credit.
For more on Professor Kelly, you can link to his CV and SSRN author page.