John N. Drobak
George Alexander Madill Professor of Real Property & Equity Jurisprudence and Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies
Office: Anheuser-Busch Hall, Room 586
Phone: (314) 935-6487
E-mail: drobak@wulaw.wustl.edu
Assistant: Pam Finnigan - (314) 935-6419
- Curriculum Vitae [view]
(For the most recent list of publications and activities, please see the current CV.) - Activities [view]
- Publications [view]
[view] Washington University Law Magazine article
[view] Washington University Record article
Courses Taught
Antitrust
Civil Procedure
Economic Regulation
Federal Jurisdiction
Theory of Property Rights
Education
B.S., 1970, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
J.D., 1973, Stanford University
Profile
John N. Drobak, George Alexander Madill Professor of Law in the School of Law and Professor of Economics and Political Economy in Arts & Sciences, has been a pioneer of interdisciplinary study who embraced the value of looking to other fields to study long before it became popular to transcend academic boundaries. His wide-ranging activities have shaped and strengthened many University departments and have made Washington University a more interdisciplinary and more global institution.
A native of upstate New York Professor Drobak earned Bachelor of Science degrees in electrical engineering and management science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970. He entered law school at Stanford University, where his studies included courses that applied economic analysis to legal problems. After earning his law degree from Stanford University in 1973, he clerked for the California Court of Appeal and then practiced law for five years with the firm Tyler, Cooper in New Haven, Connecticut. He joined the law faculty at Washington University in 1979 and now holds appointments in Law, Economics, and Political Economy. Additionally, between 1991 and 2006 Professor Drobak was a professor at the United States Business School in Prague, where he taught in the first MBA program for Central and Eastern European students.
In his pro bono work, he has consulted with Czechoslovakia in connection with its voucher privatization of large government enterprises and with the Republic Of Georgia in connection with the drafting of a new constitution. He has edited two books: "The Frontiers of New Institutional Economics," (with John Nye, Academic Press 1997), and Norms and the Law (Cambridge University Press 2006). His research has also resulted in numerous articles and book chapters on such diverse topics as the constitutional limits on utility rate-making, rent control, and other types of price regulation; the tension between federal state courts in the freeing of slaves in antebellum America; the Supreme Court’s role in the creation of a national commercial law in the 19th century; and the reexamination of legal incentives and judicial decisionmaking with cognitive science principles.
Professor Drobak is well-known for fostering academic and administrative links among numerous campus departments. His collaborative efforts have pervaded a number of disciplines, including anthropology, business, electrical engineering, philosophy, political science, and of course, law, and they have resulted in many changes in the University curricula. He is the director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in the School of Law, a fellow in the Center in Political Economy in Arts & Sciences, and former co-director of the Business, Law, and Economics Center in the John M. Olin School of Business. In 1997, he joined a group of economists and political scientists to found the International Society for New Institutional Economics, of which he now serves as Treasurer.
Professor Drobak has brought his enthusiasm for interdisciplinary learning to the classroom as he teaches courses in the fields of economic regulation and of law and economics, including Antitrust and Theory of Property Rights. The latter, which boasts a student waiting list every year, is a course for both law students and economics students, co-taught by Nobel Prize-winning economist Professor Douglass C. North. Professor Drobak also teaches Civil Procedure, to first-year law students, and Federal Jurisdiction. Despite his demandingly high standards for class participation students find him fascinating, entertaining, polite, and gentle, and have named him Law School Teacher of the Year on four separate occasions, most recently in 2007.