Bill Landes Reflects on Fifty Years of Teaching
Professor Emeritus Bill Landes late last year completed teaching his final class, capping a fifty-year career teaching at the Law School. Landes, who joined the faculty in 1974, and transitioned to emeritus status in 2009, continued to teach until the end of the 2024 fall quarter. The bittersweet moment of Landes walking into his final day of class was punctuated with applause from Law School faculty, who had gathered in the classroom that day to honor and him.
A pioneer in the field of law and economics, Landes is renowned for his influential scholarship on the application of economics and quantitative methods to law and legal institutions. Originally from the East Coast, Landes taught at Stanford, Columbia, and the City University of New York before coming to UChicago. In 1977, he cofounded the legal and economic consulting firm Lexecon (now Compass Lexecon) with Richard Posner and Andrew Rosenfield.
As a teacher and scholar, Landes’s impact on the Law School community and the legal academy will surely influence generations to come. We recently sat down with the legendary professor to discuss his impactful career and insights as he enters his new chapter.
How would you describe the Law School when you first arrived compared to today?
The one big difference and a good one, is the increase in the number of female students. There were only a handful of women when I first came and only one female faculty member. Another big change is how the faculty dresses. When I joined the Law School in 1974, most of faculty wore suits and ties. They thought it was important to set an example of how a lawyer presents himself to clients, other lawyers, and judges. So, you could always pick out the faculty members from a group of students. Today, if you walk into the classroom wing or the Green Lounge after class is over, there's no way to spot the faculty because they dress just like the students. So, that is another big difference of how things have changed.
Speaking of clothes, you were known to be quite fashionable during your time at the Law School. What inspired your snazzy wardrobe?
I've always been that way. When I was in high school, I'd work and save up money over the summer and then go to Brooks Brothers to buy a couple of button-down shirts and stripped ties and even a red vest. I went to a very artsy high school in New York, the High School of Music and Art. It still exists but now is combined with the High School of Performing Arts in New York. So, I've always been artistic and a natural extension of being artistic is concern with my appearance.
Even when I was living on fellowships and working as a teaching assistant, I had a tailor in Greenwich Village who made suits for me and for one of my close friends. Then after I started Lexecon in 1977, I had enough money to buy Italian designer clothes. If you like, that was my one vice. And for some reason, the students all knew about it. It is mentioned in a Wikipedia article. And I was even a guest star in a law school musical where my role was to critique each student’s outfit and then give them advice about how they should dress for a job interview.
Going back to the beginning of your career, did you have any idea back then that you would stay at the Law School as long as you did?
The answer is yes, because I always felt like Chicago was my intellectual home. I was a student of Gary Becker at Columbia University [later professor of economics at Chicago and Nobel Prize winner]. My intellectual heroes were economists at Chicago: Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Ronald Coase who was at the Law School. So, once I arrived at Chicago, I had absolutely no reason to leave. I had great colleagues. My closest friend was Richard Posner. Dick and I wrote several books and many articles together. My wife and I had many friends at the University and our children were quite happy at the Lab School.
Law and economics is your field, but you also have a passion for art and art collecting and taught art law for many years. Can you tell us about this interest and how it connects to your academic career?
As I already mentioned, I went to the High School of Music and Art in New York and early on had a strong interest in art. I had a lot of exposure to successful artists who were parents of my friends at high school. I got to meet many of these artists at parties. Most of them were social realist artists who believed that the central purpose of art was to lift up the average working person. They never jumped on the abstract bandwagon, which was the rage in New York. They were successful and represented by galleries in New York.
My wife and I have very similar tastes in art. After I started Lexecon with Posner and Andy Rosenfield (a third-year student at the Law School), we started buying the works of artists that I knew when I was growing up in New York. At some point, we we had a really nice collection. And then people would visit our home. Museums outside Chicago would bring groups to our apartment in Hyde Park, and I would give a little tour and lecture about how we started to collect art. Museum directors and curators came to our apartment with an eye to choosing works they hoped we would donate.
So, it was easy to move into art law because of my interest in art. I had published several papers with Posner that used economics to illuminate legal problems in the visual arts. When I was teaching art law, my wife and I would have a party for the students in the class at the end of the year where they came to our apartment for a few hours to look at our art. Sometimes we had fifty or sixty students and a few faculty members to make the party more interesting for the students.
Do you have other fond Law School memories of classes or students that have stayed with you all these years?
I always liked the students who took my classes. Because many law students had an aversion to mathematics and equations, I taught economic analysis of law for many years without using any mathematics—just simple tables and graphs. One of the students in my law and economics introductory course was [Dean] Tom Miles when he was a graduate student in economics. He then decided to go to law school while he was writing his dissertation at Chicago. Dick [Posner] and I were mainly responsible for bringing him back to the Law School as a law and economics fellow, then faculty member, and then eventually, as we know, he became dean. I encouraged Tom and many other students I had to get into law and economics.
What do you see as some of the most exciting future developments of law and economics?
I don't have much patience for very narrow theoretical papers. As an editor of the Journal of Law & Economics and later the Journal of Legal Studies, I was always much more supportive of scholars who use data to examine legal problems. And that's clearly where we are headed now. Today, scholars are developing large data sets. There are statistical programs that make it relatively easy to use large bodies of data to examine how people actually behave and react to the law.
Speaking of the future, what advice would you offer the next generation of legal professionals?
I would tell them that economics is a professional asset for a lawyer in practice, particularly for a lawyer working for a large firm or the government. That is one reason that law and economics courses have been so successful at Chicago and other law schools. In the many antitrust, copyright, and trademark cases I've been involved in at Lexecon, I have dealt with really, really smart lawyers who understood and are comfortable with economics.
What about your former students and colleagues—do you have a message for them?
Yes, I want to say to thank you. Thank you for everything. You've given me a wonderful career. I would say I’ve been very lucky to have had an exciting and rewarding career, great friends from the University and a wonderful family.
Now that you’re not teaching, what are you up to these days?
I read for pleasure, play the piano, play golf, watch sports, and recently we have been watching a lot of streaming shows on television. My wife and I divide our time between Chicago and Scottsdale. We don’t stay in Scottsdale full time because we have too many ties to Chicago. We have two children and five grandchildren who live there. In Scottsdale, every day [in the winter] is in the sixties or low seventies and sunny. I should add that golf is the only activity that the more I practice, the worse I get. I take piano lessons on Zoom with a teacher from Chicago who now lives in a rural area in Michigan. Unlike golf, the more I practice the piano, the better I get.
