Kathryn Zeiler, Nancy Barton Scholar and Professor of Law, is visiting from Boston University School of Law. Prior to joining the BU Law faculty in 2015, Zeiler was Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center (2003–2015). She has held visiting professorships at Harvard Law School, NYU School of Law, Hebrew University Faculty of Law, and Heidelberg University Faculty of Law. Zeiler teaches in the areas of tort Law, health law and law and economics. In 2021, she was nominated for the Boston University Provost’s Scholar-Teacher of the Year Award.
Zeiler’s scholarship applies economic theory and empirical methods to the study of legal issues and research questions. Her main scholarly interests include the advancement of empirical legal studies, metaresearch, importation of experimental economics results and behavioral economics theories into legal scholarship, the medical malpractice liability system, malpractice insurance markets, and patient safety. She is co-editor of the Research Handbook on Behavioral Law and Economics (2018) and has published numerous articles in journals including UCLA Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, American Economic Review, Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, and Annual Review of Law and Social Science. She is currently working on a replication project to test the credibility of quantitative empirical studies relied on by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Zeiler serves as a Fellow and current Chair of the board of directors for the Society of Empirical Legal Studies. She was elected to serve as the 2020-2021 Secretary-Treasurer for the American Law and Economics Association, served as Vice President in 2021-2022, and President and host of the association's annual meeting in 2022-2023. She was elected in 2022 to a three-year term on the board of the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science and has served as Vice President (2022). She was appointed in 2021 to the Advisory Board of ReplicationWiki and in 2023 to the Steering Committee of the Aumann-Fischer Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy housed at Hebrew University Law Faculty. She holds positions on the editorial boards of the American Law and Economics Review and Behavioral Science and Policy. She has served as a member of the Max Planck Institute’s Scientific Review Board for Research on Collective Goods (2011–2018) and as a member of the board of directors of the American Law and Economics Association (2010–2012). She is a regular peer-reviewer for a number of economics, law and economics, health policy and medical journals.
Zeiler received her B.S. (Business) from Indiana University, a masters degree (Taxation) from Golden Gate University, her J.D. from the University of Southern California, and a masters degree (Social Sciences) and Ph.D. (Economics) from the California Institute of Technology.
For links to publications, visit https://sites.bu.edu/kzeiler/.
