Edward Glaeser to Give Storrs Lectures on March 2 and 3

Edward Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, will deliver the Storrs Lectures at Yale Law School on March 2 and March 3. The lectures are open to the Yale Community.

His talks, titled, “The Law and the City,” will examine the positive and negative social interactions of urban density and how laws have the capacity to make the positive interactions more productive and to reduce the harm from negative social interactions.

The lectures will begin with an overview of urban resurgence in the west and the emergence of mega-cities in the once overwhelmingly rural poorer parts of the world. Yet despite the great success of cities like New York and San Francisco, we live in an age of urban discontent. Gentrification, limited upward mobility, policy-community conflict and high housing prices all trouble many of our wealthiest cities. In all cases, these problems reflect a public sector that has not kept pace with private success. In some of these cases, the problems also reflect an increasing tendency of legal rules, such as land use regulations, to limit the urban ability to adapt.

Since 1992, Glaeser has regularly taught microeconomics theory and occasionally urban and public economics. He has served as Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, and Director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. He has published dozens of papers on economic growth of cities, law, and economics. In particular, his work has focused on the determinants of city growth and the role of cities as centers of idea transmission.

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1992. His books include Cities, Agglomeration, and Spatial Equilibrium (Oxford University Press, 2008), Rethinking Federal Housing Policy (American Enterprise Institute Press, 2008), and Triumph of the City (Penguin Press, 2011).

The Storrs Lectures were founded in 1889. The fund was established through the gift of Eliza T. and Mary A. Robinson in memory of their great-uncle, the Honorable William L. Storrs, B.A. 1814, at one time Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Errors of Connecticut and professor at Yale Law School. These annual lectures are given by a prominent scholar within the broad topic of fundamental problems with law and jurisprudence.

The lectures will be held on March 2 at 4:30 p.m. and March 3 at noon in the Calabresi Faculty Lounge.