Francesco Parisi

Francesco Parisi (born May 31, 1962) is a legal scholar and economist, working primarily in the United States and Italy. He is currently the Oppenheimer Wolff & Donnelly Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Bologna. Parisi is among the most prolific and influential scholars specializing in the economic analysis of law. His research tends to be characterized by the use of formal models and technical results, ranging widely across diverse topic areas, from international law to behavioral law and economics to tort law.

Parisi earned his law degree at the University of Rome in 1985. He later studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he obtained an LL.M. (1988) and J.S.D. (1990). He taught briefly at Louisiana State University Law Center before moving to George Mason University School of Law. While an associate professor at George Mason, Parisi obtained an M.A. in economics at Berkeley, later earning a Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University.

After lecturing briefly at University of California, Berkeley (1990-91) and Louisiana State University Law Center (1991-93), Parisi was invited to join the faculty of George Mason University School of Law, an important center for new research in law and economics, where he remained from 1993 to 2006. The University of Minnesota Law School recruited Parisi in 2006.

At the University of Minnesota, Parisi teaches methodological courses in law and economics, including seminars in game theory, public choice, social choice. Since 2002, Parisi has split his time between teaching in the United States and Italy. He taught at the University of Milan from 2002 to 2006 and has taught at the University of Bologna since 2006, where he remains an active member of the economics faculty.

Parisi's research interests are unusually broad, and he has written on a large number of legal topics. His early writings included historical and comparative analyses of the evolution of the law, though his subsequent research has been entirely in the domain of law and economics. Parisi's work is often technical, relying on mathematical models and formal proofs to establish a practical point about the incentive structure of the law. In particular, his work often focuses on logical symmetries, secondary effects, and evolutionary changes in the law. His work tends not to favor any dogmatic or political perspective, approaching controversial topics with analytical detachment.

Parisi is a founding member of both the American Law & Economics Association and Italian Society for Law and Economics. He currently serves as editor-in-chief of the Review of Law and Economics, and is general editor (with Richard Posner) of the reference series Economic Approaches to Law and Research Handbooks in Law and Economics.

Books

• The Language of Law and Economics (Cambridge University Press 2013) ISBN 978-0-521697-712
• The Economics of Lawmaking (Oxford University Press 2009) (with Vincy Fon) ISBN 978-0-19-537415-5
• Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics (Oxford University Press 2014)
• The Law and Economics of Irrational Behavior (Stanford University Press 2005) (with Vernon L. Smith)
• Law and Economics (3 volumes, Edward Elgar Press 1997) (with Richard A. Posner)

Articles

• Jury Size and the Hung-Jury Paradox, 42 Journal of Legal Studies 399-422 (2013) (with Barbara Luppi)
• Optimal Remedies for Bilateral Contracts, 40 Journal of Legal Studies 245-271 (2011) (with Vincy Fon and Barbara Luppi)
• Substituting Complements, 3 Journal of Competition Law and Economics 1-15 (2007) (with Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci)
• Crowding-Out in Productive and Redistributive Rent-Seeking, 133 Public Choice 199-229 (2007) (with Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci, Eric Langlais and Bruno Lovat)
• Rents, Dissipation, and Lost Treasures: Rethinking Tullock’s Paradox, 124 Public Choice 411-422 (2005) (with Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci)
• Comparative Causation, 6 American Law and Economics Review 345-368 (2004) (with Vincy Fon)
• Litigation and the Evolution of Legal Remedies: A Dynamic Model, 116 Public Choice 419-433 (2003) (with Vincy Fon)
• Political Coase Theorem, 115 Public Choice 1-36 (2003)
• Fragmentation in Property: Towards a General Model, 158 Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 594-613 (2002) (with Norbert Schulz and Ben Depoorter)
• Entropy in Property, 50 American Journal of Comparative Law 595-622 (2002)
• The Genesis of Liability in Ancient Law, 3 American Law and Economics Review 82-124 (2001)