Professor Ellickson Honored with Ronald H. Coase Medal

Professor Robert C. Ellickson ’66 was recently awarded the Ronald H. Coase Medal at the 26th Annual Meeting of the American Law and Economics Association.

The meeting was held on May 20-21, 2016 at Harvard Law School. The Ronald H. Coase medal is awarded bi-annually “in recognition of major contributions to the field of law and economics.”

Professor Ellickson is the fourth recipient of the medal. In 2012, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law and former Yale Law School Dean Guido Calabresi ’58 was the second recipient.

In his acceptance remarks, Ellickson attributed his receipt of the Coase Prize to his publication of Order Without Law, which was awarded the Order of the Coif Triennial Book Award in 1996. The book stressed the centrality, in some social contexts, of rules derived from informal social norms. It featured an empirical study of how neighbors in rural Shasta County, California, resolve disputes stemming from trespass by cattle. In one of the most-cited articles on law, Ronald Coase, a recipient of a Nobel Prize in economics, offered a law-centered analysis of these sorts of disputes. Ellickson showed that, contrary to Coase’s abstract analysis, neighbors in fact generally applied informal norms, not law, to settle these controversies. At the Harvard event, Ellickson stated that he should share the award with other law-and-economics scholars who had sounded the same theme during the 1990s, particularly Robert Cooter, Lisa Bernstein, Richard McAdams, and Eric Posner.

Robert C. Ellickson served as Walter E. Meyer Professor of Property and Urban Law at Yale Law School from 1988 until 2015, when he took emeritus status and began teaching half-time. He formerly was a member of the law faculties at USC and Stanford. His major research interests, besides social norms, include property, land use, housing, urban history, and the organization of households, community associations, and cities. Professor Ellickson’s other books include The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth (2008), Land Use Controls: Cases and Materials (4th edition 2013, with Vicki Been, Roderick M. Hills, Jr. and Christopher Serkin), and Perspectives on Property Law (4th edition 2014, with Carol M. Rose and Henry E. Smith). He has published numerous articles in legal and public policy journals. A veteran teacher of Property and Land Use, he also periodically teaches a seminar on the history of development of the City of New Haven.

Robert Ellickson was a founding member and later a director of the American Law and Economics Association, and served as its President in 2000–01. In 1995, he was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1986–98 he was an Adviser to the American Law Institute during its preparation of the Restatement, Third, Property—Servitudes, and, in 2015, began serving as an Advisor to the Restatement (Fourth) of Property. At the Yale Law School he has served as Deputy Dean (1991–92) and, during the reconstruction of the Sterling Law buildings, as chairman of the Building Committee.

Professor Ellickson is married to Lynn Hammer and has two children. For several decades he has competed in Scrabble tournaments and, on several occasions when fortune has smiled, has finished among the top 20 competitors in the North American Scrabble Championship.

The American Law and Economics Association is dedicated to the advancement of economic understanding of law and related areas of public policy and regulation. Founded in 1991, the membership includes academic and practicing lawyers and economists. The Association holds an annual two-day meeting in May at which members present papers dealing with a wide variety of topics concerning the interrelation of law and economics. Since 1999, the Association has published the American Law and Economics Review, a refereed journal.