George L. Priest, Edward J. Phelps Professor of Law and Economics, 1981-2024
George L. Priest
REFERENCES:
Faculty biography, George L. Priest
Daniel Klerman & Yoon-Ho Alex Lee, “‘The Selection of Disputes’ at Forty” (Feb. 2025)
Conference Honors Work of Professor George Priest, Yale Law School News (Sept. 19, 2024)
Yale Law School Mourns the Loss of Edward J. Phelps Professor of Law and Economics George L. Priest, Yale Law School News (Dec. 20, 2024)
George Priest: In Memoriam, FedSoc Blog (Dec. 26, 2024)
George L. Priest (1947-2024) joined the Law School faculty in 1981, was named the John M. Olin Professor of Law and Economics in 1986, and the Edward J. Phelps Professor of Law and Economics in 2010. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and made foundational contributions to the study of law and economics, both in his research and in the organization of the field. He was one of the founders of the American Law and Economics Association (ALEA) in 1991 and served as its first president. The ALEA is the preeminent law and economics organization whose mission is to advance "the economic understanding of law and related areas of public policy and regulation." Priest also created the faculty workshop at the Law School as well as a law and economics workshop, which greatly enhanced the intellectual life of the School.
His 1984 article, "The Selection of Disputes for Litigation," coauthored with UCLA economist Benjamin Klein is among the most influential law and economics articles of all time. The article challenged the then-common practice of drawing broad conclusions regarding the law, its processes, and its social effects, from a study of litigation outcomes. The central insight was that some cases were more likely to settle than others, and thus litigated disputes were not representative of all disputes. By introducing the concept of selection bias into the legal literature, Priest and Klein fundamentally altered our understanding of the legal process as well as the interpretation of empirical analyses of litigation. The article resulted in Priest being one of the rare legal scholars with a theorem named after him, the Priest-Klein Hypothesis (the tendency of 50 percent plaintiff victories among litigated cases).
He was also one of the leading antitrust scholars. In 2007, he authored "Rethinking Antitrust Law in an Age of Network Industries," maintaining that antitrust analysis, which traditionally characterized vertical and horizontal agreements as restraints on competition, needed to evolve to accommodate networks, and in particular, to account for positive network effects. He thereby created a framework for the contemporary understanding of the competitive dynamics of technological giants.
Priest was a scholar of extraordinary breadth. In addition to his law and economics and antitrust scholarship, he made significant contributions to torts, consumer protection, and insurance law. He explored the connections between these fields in "The Modern Expansion of Tort Liability: Its Sources, Its Effects, and Its Reform" (1991), which contended that the expansion of tort liability in the 1970s resulted in the disruption of commercial property and casualty insurance markets in the 1980s, which in turn led to a contraction of goods and services available to the public, and to price increases for those still available. He noted that the expansion of tort liability provided few benefits; the rate of accidents did not decrease, and it was much more costly to deliver the same level of insurance benefits to victims through the tort system than through insurance policies (such as health care) that parties purchased for themselves.
Priest was known for his generosity and mentorship of students and young academics. As YLS Dean Heather Gerken stated, "Innumerable lawyers, academics, and leaders around the world can explain their success at least in part with one simple statement: ‘George believed in me.'" He was the faculty advisor to the Yale Law School Chapter of the Federalist Society from January 1982 to his passing in December 2024. His influence on fellow academics, many of whom were former students, was celebrated at a conference in his honor held at the Law School in September 2024. Entitled "Law and Markets: A Conference on Themes in the Work of George Priest," the conference brought together scholars from around the world to present papers on panels reflecting Priest’s canonical intellectual contributions: "Law, Risk, and Uncertainty," "Torts," "Legal Institutions," "Antitrust," and "Capitalism," which will be published in a symposium issue of the Yale Journal on Regulation.