Alan Miller joins Western Law as Canada Research Chair
June 27, 2019
Western Law is pleased to announce Professor Alan Miller will join the Faculty of Law as a Canada Research Chair (CRC) beginning July 1. Miller has been named as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) CRC (Tier 2) in Law and Economics.
“We’re excited to be appointing the first ever CRC at Western Law,” said Dean Erika Chamberlain. “It’s a sign of our growing research strength and our diversity of research methodologies. Professor Miller will add an important new dimension to our scholarly community.”
For the past ten years Miller has been a faculty member in the Department of Economics and in the Faculty of Law at the University of Haifa in Israel, and was a visiting professor at the Pritzker School of Law at Northwestern University in Chicago in 2015-2016.
His primary area of research draws from an area of economics called social choice theory that he uses to study normative questions in law, such as whether and when courts should decide cases on the basis of community standards and how corporations should conduct shareholder votes.
“Social choice is important for the study of law because it provides a formal methodology that can be used to evaluate normative legal propositions,” says Miller. “It allows us to clarify arguments and to test them through thought experiments. Legal doctrines and judicial decisions are full of normative principles, so this is a good way to study their implications.”
Miller holds a Ph.D. in Social Science from the California Institute of Technology (2009), a J.D. from Northwestern University (2001) and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.
The author of numerous scholarly articles in leading journals in law and political science, he has presented his work more than one hundred times at conferences and at colloquium talks at universities around the world. Miller’s work in patent licensing contracts was awarded the prestigious Jerry S. Cohen Award for Antitrust Scholarship in 2018.
He serves frequently as a referee for leading academic journals and is an associate editor for the interdisciplinary journal Mathematical Social Sciences.
Miller was one of nine newly named CRCs at Western University recently announced by Kristy Duncan, federal Minister of Science and Sport. The CRC program invests around $295 million per year to attract and retain some of the world’s most accomplished and promising minds.
“These are some of the most respected researchers whose backgrounds represent the diversity of Canada,” said Ted Hewitt, SSHRC President. “Together with their Chair colleagues across the country, their contributions to research excellence across a wide variety of fields will benefit the quality of life for all Canadians and others around the world.”
