Chairs Conferred on YLS Professors Richard Brooks and Daniel Markovits ’00

The Yale Corporation has voted to approve endowed professorships for two Yale Law School professors. Richard Brooks has been named the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law, and Daniel Markovits ’00 has been named the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law.

Richard Brooks joined the Yale Law School faculty in 2003 as an Associate Professor of Law. His areas of expertise are law and economics, contracts, business organizations, and race and the law. He previously taught at Northwestern University School of Law and in Cornell University’s Department of Policy Analysis and Management. He has served as a visiting researcher at the Center in Law, Economics and Organization at the University of Southern California Law School; on an advisory committee to the Social, Behavioral and Economics Sciences Division of the National Science Foundation; and as a research specialist in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice.

He holds a B.A. from Cornell, an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and a J.D. from the University of Chicago.

The Leighton Homer Surbeck Professorship was established by Margaret Surbeck in 2000 to honor the memory of her husband Homer Surbeck ’27, founding member of the law firm of Hughes, Hubbard & Reed, and to reflect Homer Surbeck's lifelong commitment to the highest ideals of the legal profession.

Daniel Markovits joined the Yale Law School faculty in 2001 as an Associate Professor of Law, after clerking for the Honorable Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. He was named a Professor of Law in 2007. He works in the philosophical foundations of private law, moral and political philosophy, and behavioral economics. He has written numerous articles on contracts, legal ethics, distributive justice, and other topics and is author of the book, A Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Advocacy in a Democratic Age (2008) and the forthcoming Contract Law and Legal Methods.

He holds a B.A. from Yale, an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, a B.Phil. and D.Phil. from Oxford, and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

The Guido Calabresi Professorship was established in 2006 through a bequest of Ralph Gregory Elliot ’61 to honor Guido Calabresi ’58, former Dean of Yale Law School and respected jurist on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.