Eric Talley is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and Co-Director, Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership. He is an expert in the intersection of corporate law, governance, and finance, and he teaches/researches in areas that include corporate law and finance, mergers and acquisitions, quantitative methods, machine learning, contract and commercial law, alternative investments, game theory, and economic analysis of law.  Talley has held permanent or visiting appointments at the University of California at Berkeley, University of Southern California, Caltech, University of Chicago; Harvard University; Georgetown University, RAND Graduate School, and Stanford University. He has also taught short courses at Columbia, UC Berkeley; the University of Miami; University of San Diego (London Program); University of Sydney (Australia); University of New South Wales (Australia); Tel Aviv University (Israel), the Interdisciplinary Center (Israel); ETH Zurich (Switzerland); and the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands). In 2017, Talley was chosen by Columbia Law School's graduating class to receive the Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

He is Immediate Past Chair of the board of directors of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies (SELS) and was the SELS chair in 2017-19 and co-president in 2013–2014. He has also served several terms on the board of the American Law and Economics Association (ALEA). Talley is a frequent commentator in the national media, and he speaks regularly to corporate boards and regulators on issues pertaining to fiduciary duties, governance, and finance.

Talley holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School, where he was articles editor for the Stanford Law Review; a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University; and B.A. degrees in economics and political science from the University of California, San Diego. He is a native of Los Alamos, N.M.