Go Back

Anup Malani

The Lee and Brena Freeman Professor of Law

The University of Chicago Law School

Anup Malani is a Pearson Faculty Affiliate and the Lee and Brena Freeman Professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a Professor at the Pritzker School of Medicine. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Boston, a Senior Fellow at the Schaeffer Center at the University of Southern California, and an editor at the Journal of Law and Economics. He is the cofounder and Faculty Director of the International Innovation Corps, a social service program that sends teams of University of Chicago and Indian university graduates to work on innovative development projects with government officials in India and Brazil.

Malani has a PhD in economics and a JD, both from University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Stephen Williams on the US Court of Appeals for District of Columbia and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the US Supreme Court.

Malani conducts research in law and economics, health economics and development economics. His law and economics research focuses on judicial behavior, measuring the welfare impact of laws, and, recently legal implications of blockchain. His health economics research focuses on the value of medical innovation and health care insurance, control of infectious diseases, placebo effects, and conflicts of interest in medicine. Malani’s development economics work focuses on health care supply and financing in India and the growth of and quality of life in urban slums. He is the principal investigator on the Indian Health Insurance Experiment, an 11,000 household randomized controlled trial of health insurance in Karnataka, India, and on a large-scale impact evaluation of Mission Kakatiya, a major effort to expand rainfall capture as means of irrigation in Telangana, India. Malani’s research has been published in leading journals in a number of different fields, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Econometrics, the Harvard Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Archives of Internal Medicine, and Theoretical Population Biology. Malani teaches courses in commercial law, health law, the canons of American legal thought, law and economics and law and development in the Law School and a PhD course in law and economics in the Economics Department.

Baidoa, Somalia

Makeshift, temporary shelter made of plastic and clothing at a refugee center in Baidoa, Somalia.