Louis Kaplow, the Finn M.W. Caspersen and Household International Professor of Law and Economics at Harvard Law School, will receive the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at the University of Chicago Convocation this June.

Kaplow has made groundbreaking contributions to the study of law and economics, taxation and public economics, industrial organization and antitrust law, and welfare economics. His foundational work has employed formal and informal economic reasoning to analyze the effects of legal rules and institutions as well as to provide new conceptual frameworks that revise central legal and economic understandings. His most recent scholarship rethinks optimal income taxation, merger analysis, and competition regulation of dominant firms.

Kaplow is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received lifetime achievement awards for scholarship from the National Tax Association and from the American Law and Economics Association.

Kaplow is one of three scholars to receive an honorary degree from UChicago during the Class of 2026 ceremony happening on June 6. The other two are chemist Sir Shankar Balasubramanian, and historian and archaeologist Greg Woolf.