Daniel Markovits

Daniel Markovits (born August 4, 1969) is the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at the Yale Law School.

He delivered the 2015 commencement speech at the Yale Law School, in which he argued that “meritocracy now constitutes a modern-day aristocracy, one might even say, purpose-built for a world in which the greatest source of wealth is not land or factories but human capital, the free labor of skilled workers.” His forthcoming book, titled Snowball Inequality: Meritocracy and the Crisis of Capitalism, develops this argument.

Major works

• 2008, A Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Advocacy in a Democratic Age
• 2012, Contract Law and Legal Methods (Foundation Press)
• 2015, "The Distributional Preferences of an Elite," Science
• Snowball Inequality: Meritocracy and the Crisis of Capitalism (under contract at Harvard University Press)