Adam Chilton and Omri Ben-Shahar recently received professorships.

Chilton was named the first Howard G. Krane Professor of Law and Ben-Shahar was named the Leo and Eileen Herzel Distinguished Service Professor of Law. Both appointments were both effective on Jan. 1.

The Howard G. Krane Distinguished Visiting Professorship in Business was created in 2015 by an endowment from Mr. Krane’s daughters—Hilary Krane, ’89, and Marie Krane—and their families. Krane, a 1957 graduate of the Law School, joined Kirkland & Ellis that same year and remained at that firm for six decades, serving as a managing partner for many years. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute, he received numerous awards for professional excellence and service, including a national diversity award for supporting and mentoring women attorneys.

From 2016-2023, the Howard G. Krane Distinguished Visiting Professorship was held by a faculty member from the Booth School of Business who taught at the Law School. Thanks to a new gift from Hilary Krane in 2023, the professorship has been transformed from a visiting faculty position to a permanent professorship at the Law School.

Chilton has focused many of his research projects on how law can promote economic, social, and political development around the world. His book with co-author Mila Versteeg, How Constitutional Rights Matter (2020), won the Best Book Prize from the International Society of Public Law and from the Human Rights Section of the American Political Science Association. Chilton also has ongoing projects focused on documenting the development and enforcement of competition law regimes around the world, studying how Bilateral Labor Agreements can be used to promote international labor migration, and researching how to improve the quality of life in informal urban communities.

In addition to these international and comparative projects, Chilton engages in research topics that include reforming the U.S. Supreme Court, measuring the ideology of the American legal profession, studying the determinants of judicial decision making, and improving legal education and the legal academy. He also serves as a co-editor of the Journal of Law and Economics.

Before joining the UChicago faculty, he taught at the Law School as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law.

Ben-Shahar is the Kearney Director of the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics at the Law School, where he teaches contracts, sales, trademark law, insurance law, consumer law, sales law, e-commerce, food law, law and economics, and game theory and the law. His primary interests lie in contract law, consumer protection, and law and technology—fields he has written on extensively. He is the co-author of Personalized Law: Different Rules for Different People (2021, with Ariel Porat) and More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure (2014, with Carl Schneider). He also is the co-reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of Consumer Contracts.

Before coming to UChicago, Ben-Shahar was the Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law and Economics at the University of Michigan. Prior to that, he taught at Tel-Aviv University, was a member of Israel's Antitrust Court and clerked at the Supreme Court of Israel.

Ben-Shahar and Chilton were among a group of 18 UChicago faculty members who received named or distinguish service professorships effective with the new year.