NDLS Hosts Law & Economics Conference

Notre Dame Law School will host the Midwestern Law & Economics Association (MLEA) annual meeting on October 9-10, 2009 at Eck Hall of Law. The MLEA is a loose consortium of law school professors that began with Big Ten schools that works to promote research in law and economics, and to enhance understanding of how economics can be applied to solve legal problems. Topics to be covered at the conference include: torts and health care, criminal law and welfare economics, and intellectual property and competition law. The yearly conference has always sought to help scholars at the beginning stages of their projects.

Link to the conference Web page at MLEA Home Page

Notre Dame Professor of Law Margaret Brinig and Assistant Professor of Law Daniel Kelly organized the conference this year.

Brinig is the Fritz Duda Family Chair in Law at the University of Notre Dame and the Associate Dean for Faculty Research. Her primary research and writing field is the law and economics of the family, and she is especially interested in empirical answers to questions addressed by law. Brinig has written more than 70 articles and book chapters, and has worked with coauthors in law, economics, sociology, medicine and public health from all over the United States and from Canada. She referees for numerous journals and presses in law and economics including the Journal of Legal Studies, the American Law and Economics Review and Yale University Press. For more on Professor Brinig, visit her faculty profile web page.

Kelly was a Terence M. Considine Research Fellow in Law and Economics and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School before joining Notre Dame Law School’s faculty this fall. Previously, he clerked for the Honorable Richard C. Wesley of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, worked as a litigation associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, and was a John M. Olin Research Fellow at Yale Law School. Kelly’s research and teaching interests include property, land use, and natural resources law, as well as trusts and estates. His current projects explore the effectiveness of eminent domain, secret buying agents, and other mechanisms for overcoming holdouts and assembling land and the idea of “strategic spillovers,” the opportunistic use of property to harm others in order to extract payments in exchange for desisting. For more on Professor Kelly, visit his faculty profile web page.