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A.B., Harvard, 1985; J.D., Stanford, 1989. Professor Heller teaches courses in property, land use, real estate, and international law and development. His scholarship explores property theory in a wide range of settings. His book The Missing Market: Why More Property Means Less Prosperity, Basic Books, 2008, draws on everyday experiences to show why property rights matter so much more than people may realize. Last year, Professor Heller published Corporate Governance Lessons from Transition Economy Reforms, co-edited with Merritt Fox, Princeton University Press, 2006, a collection of essays that uses postsocialist economic experience to illuminate the fundamentals of corporate governance.
In the past decade, Professor Heller’s writing has ranged widely across property theory topics. For example, his work on “The Tragedy of the Anticommons,” published in the Harvard Law Review and in Science, draws on post-socialist transition and biomedical research to show how the creation of too many private property rights can be as costly as creating too few. In “The Liberal Commons,” coauthored with Hanoch Dagan and published in the Yale Law Journal, Professor Heller explores declining black landownership in America and offers a new theory of commons property. In addition, he has published articles on takings law, corporate governance, natural resources, restitution, and post-socialist transition in numerous journals and edited volumes.
Professor Heller joined the Columbia faculty in 2002. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 2004-05. He also taught at the University of Michigan Law School, 1994-2002, where he received the L. Hart Wright Award for excellence in teaching. He has been a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has co-directed corporate governance research at the University of Michigan Business School’s William Davidson Institute. Professor Heller was a visiting professor at UCLA, 2006-07; NYU, 2001; an Olin Senior Fellow at Columbia, 2000; and a visiting lecturer at Yale, 1991. He worked at the World Bank on post-socialist property law transition, 1990-94. Professor Heller clerked for the Hon. James R. Browning, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. View less