Professor Richard R.W. Brooks
Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law, Columbia University Law School
Education
J.D., The University of Chicago Law School, 1998
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1998
M.A., University of California, Berkeley, 1996
B.A., Cornell University, 1988
J.D., The University of Chicago Law School, 1998
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1998
M.A., University of California, Berkeley, 1996
B.A., Cornell University, 1988
Areas of Expertise
Contracts
Business organization
Agency and fiduciary law
Law, economics, and social practice
Professional Engagement
Richard R.W. Brooks is the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He joined the faculty in 2013. His scholarship focuses on contracts and agency, among other forms of business and social organization. Brooks has published numerous books and articles that analyze behavior through the lens of economics, custom, and law.
His most recent book, Saving the Neighborhood: Racially Restrictive Covenants, Law, and Social Norms (co-authored with Carol Rose), examines the history and enduring legacy of racially restrictive property agreements (or racial covenants), which the Supreme Court ruled unenforceable in 1948.
Brooks’ work also includes articles about contract law and theory, experimental economics, the economics of environmental law, fairness, and perceptions of the legal system.
He was a visiting professor at the Law School in 2006, and was the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He also taught previously at Northwestern University School of Law and at Cornell University in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management. Brooks 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.
Brooks holds a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, a Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. from Cornell University.