Three Faculty Receive Named, Distinguished Service Professorships
Ginsburg, Robertson, and Goldin Among 19 UChicago Professors to Earn New Designations
Two Law School faculty members have received named professorships and one has received a distinguished service professorship.
- Tom Ginsburg, a leading expert on international and comparative law, has been designated the Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law. He has held the Leo Spitz Professorship in International Law since 2011.
- Adriana Robertson, an innovative business law and finance scholar who joins the Law School on July 1, is the inaugural Donald N. Pritzker Professor of Business Law.
- Jacob Goldin, a top scholar of tax law and policy who also joins the Law School on July 1, is the inaugural Richard M. Lipton Professor of Tax Law.
Dean Thomas J. Miles, the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Law and Economics, congratulated all three faculty members in an email to the Law School faculty, saying, “It is terrific to see their impressive achievements, their splendid teaching, and their many contributions to our intellectual life honored in this way. We all look forward to the ways in which they will add to the distinction of the existing professorship and establish a high standard of excellence for the new professorships.”
Biographical information about the three faculty members is below. Sixteen additional professors from around the University have received named professorships and designations of Distinguished Service Professor. Read more about these professors at the University website.
Tom Ginsburg
Ginsburg is internationally known for his expertise on constitutional design, international and comparative law, and democracy around the world. He counsels foreign governments and international organizations on constitutional design, and he cofounded the Comparative Constitutions Project, an acclaimed project that produces the most comprehensive data on the world’s constitutions. He also has played a leading role in bringing the tools of social science to international law scholarship, often using rigorous empirical methods to examine pressing issues.
He is the author of five books, including How to Save a Constitutional Democracy (with Professor Aziz Huq, 2018), which explored the structure, decline, and preservation of democracy throughout the world and won the International Society of Public Law’s 2019 book prize. He also wrote Judicial Review in New Democracies (2003), which won the C. Herman Pritchett Award from the American Political Science Association; The Endurance of National Constitutions (2009), which also won a best book prize from APSA; Judicial Reputation (2015); and Democracies and International Law (2021). He is also the editor of about two dozen volumes.
Before entering law teaching, he served as a legal adviser at the Iran-US Claims Tribunal, The Hague, Netherlands. He holds BA, JD, and PhD degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Adriana Robertson
Robertson, who will join UChicago on July 1 from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, is known for her innovative approach to scholarship, in which she often challenges assumptions to better understand how the world actually works.
Her research areas include business law, law and economics, financial markets, and securities regulation. In one recent paper, Robertson and a coauthor surveyed a representative sample of US individuals about how well leading academic theories describe their financial beliefs and decisions. The results offered insight into what factors individuals consider when deciding what fraction of their portfolio to invest in stocks as well as how individuals consciously perceive themselves to be making financial decisions. In another recent paper, Robertson and three coauthors examined how well leading academic theories describe the motivations and beliefs of high-net-worth individuals. The responses of the wealthy, they found, were surprisingly similar to those of average households—though the wealthy were less driven by discomfort with the market, financial constraints, and labor income considerations.
Robertson holds a JD from Yale Law School, where she was on the board of the Yale Journal on Regulation and the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism; a PhD in Finance from the Yale School of Management; and a BA from the University of Toronto, where she was awarded the Lorne T. Morgan Gold Medal in Economics.
The Donald N. Pritzker Professorship in Business Law was established in 2015 in honor of Donald N. Pritzker, ’59, by his children, JB, Penny, and Tony, MBA’87.
Jacob Goldin
Goldin, who will join UChicago on July 1 from Stanford Law, is an expert in tax policy whose scholarship brings the tools of law and economics to bear on pressing societal issues such as childhood poverty.
In recent scholarship, Goldin focused on the Child Tax Credit, which was created in 1997 to combat child poverty and was temporarily expanded in 2021 as part of the federal COVID-19 stimulus package. Through his work, Goldin examined the net fiscal cost of the expansion and, in a 2021 paper, he and a coauthor examined data under pre-2021 rules to highlight stark racial disparities in CTC eligibility and benefits.
Goldin and two coauthors were also honored this spring with a National Institute for Health Care Management 2022 Research Award for a paper in which they used empirical analysis to demonstrate a link between increased health insurance enrollment and a decrease in mortality. NIHCM awards recognize the contributions of researchers and journalists who bring to light new evidence that advances the health system and the health of Americans. In “Health Insurance and Mortality: Experimental Evidence from Taxpayer Outreach” (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2021), Goldin and his coauthors studied the impact of an informational letter that the IRS sent to households that had paid a tax penalty for not enrolling in the Affordable Care Act. That intervention, they discovered, led both to increased insurance coverage in the following two years as well as reduced mortality among middle-aged adults.
Goldin holds a PhD in economics from Princeton and a JD from Yale. He has been a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research since 2018.
The Richard M. Lipton Professorship in Tax Law was created this year thanks to a generous gift from Richard M. Lipton, ’77, and his wife, Jane.