Guido Calabresi - Definition

Judge Guido Calabresi (born 1932 in Milan, Italy) is currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He received his law degree from the Yale Law School in 1958, and was the dean of the Yale Law School from 1985 to 1994. He holds the position of Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law and Professorial Lecturer in Law at the Yale Law School.

Apart from an academic and judicial career, Calabresi is recognised as one of the founding fathers of law and economics. His two seminal contributions to the field are the application of economics to tort law, and a legal interpretation of the Coase theorem.

In 1961, he published a paper titled "Some Thoughts on Risk Distribution and the Law of Torts" in the Yale Law Review. This research was subsequently expended in his 1970 book titled The Cost of Accidents: A Legal and Economic Analysis. His other major work in law and economics is the article written with Douglas Melamed titled Property Rules, Liability Rules and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral and published in 1972 in the Harvard Law Review. This latter article has eventually become one of the most cited law articles of all time.