Aaron Edlin
Aaron Edlin

Aaron Edlin is a leading expert in antitrust economics, antitrust law, and law and economics. He is also an entrepreneur and co-founded bepress, a SaaS provider to academia and formerly an academic publisher. He has published in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and numerous other venues. He is co-author of one of the leading casebooks on antitrust with P. Areeda & L. Kaplow: “Antitrust Analysis: Problems, Text, and Cases”. He served on the 2008 Obama Presidential campaign’s competition policy committee, and as Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Clinton White House covering industrial organization, regulation and antitrust. He is Secretary-Treasurer of the American Law and Economics Association and will be President in 2020-21. He was founding editor with Joseph Stiglitz and Brad Delong of the Economists’ Voice as well as The B.E. Journal in Economic Analysis & Policy, and has been an associate editor of the Journal of Law, Economics and Organization and the Journal of Industrial Economics.

Today, Prof. Edlin holds the Richard Jennings Chair and professorships in both the economics department and law school at UC Berkeley and is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He began his career as an assistant professor of economics at UC Berkeley in 1993. By age 31, he was a full professor with tenured appointments in both Berkeley Law School and Berkeley’s economics department. He has been a visiting professor or researcher at Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and Georgetown. He received tenure at UC Berkeley in 1997, his Ph.D. and J.D. from Stanford in 1993; and AB Summa Cum Laude from Princeton in 1988 where he received the Herrick Prize for Best Thesis in the Woodrow Wilson School.

Columns by Aaron Edlin
Doubling Down on the Case for the Unconstitutionality of the California Recall

Berkeley Law professor Aaron Edlin and dean Erwin Chemerinsky respond to arguments by Illinois Law dean Vikram David Amar and Michigan Law dean emeritus Evan Caminker regarding the constitutionality of California’s recall process for governor. Professor Edlin and Dean Chemerinsky first rebut the argument that California Supreme Court precedent determines the outcome in this case and then argue on the merits that California’s recall process attempts to do in two steps what is clearly unconstitutional to do in one; because the ballot is an election for who will be governor, the candidate with the most votes should be the one chosen.