Alvin K. Klevorick

John Thomas Smith Professor of Law and Professor of Economics

Al Klevorick, BA, Amherst College; PhD, Princeton University; faculty member at Yale since 1967: You are a distinguished economist and law professor whose subjects are antitrust and economic regulation, law and economics, torts, market organization, and economic theory.

You came to Yale in the late 1960s, part of an astonishing cohort of junior faculty in economics, and you soon established yourself as an important contributor to the economics of regulation and antitrust. Your interest in these intrinsically interdisciplinary subjects led to your joint appointment in the Law School, where you became one of the pioneers of the emerging field of law and economics.

You are known for your extraordinarily careful research that has brought serious data into intellectual arenas where anecdote or theory had reigned supreme. Some of your most famous work focused on integrating the economics of industrial organization into antitrust law in a sophisticated way, particularly with regard to predatory pricing.  

Among your major contributions to law and economics has been your exemplary leadership as the editor of The Bell Journal of Economics (subsequently renamed The RAND Journal of Economics), the first journal to focus on industrial organization, regulation of industry, and antitrust policy. You later applied these same skills to editing The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, with comparable success.

Your powers of expression have seemed to be unlimited: your own writing and your consistently insightful suggestions to other writers have been widely appreciated, and your fastidious attention to translating jargon into precise and accessible prose has become legendary. Indeed, your strengths as author and editor have led to your being asked an untold number of times to be a member of university committees. You always, generously, have agreed.

Since the 1980s, you have been a leading citizen of both the FAS and the Law School. You served twelve years as director of the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics and another twelve as director of the Division of Social Sciences. You also have served too many terms as deputy dean of the Law School for anyone to calculate, overseeing the curriculum, faculty assignments, and other essential (if ticklish) matters. It has been agreed by all that you know the Law School’s written procedures and unwritten common law better than anyone else. Whenever a question arises as to whether a particular procedure is the proper one, or how an ambiguous rule should be interpreted, the answer always has been, “Better ask Al.” 

One of your colleagues has suggested that you are regarded as the conscience of the Law School for the same qualities that mark you as a scholar, teacher, and mentor: your knowledge, integrity, scrupulousness, conscientiousness, exactness, and overall stewardship. One characteristic of your work in leadership roles is that, in every single instance, your colleagues have wished you would stay forever.

What we all will do without your steady presence is hard to know. But as you retire, your two homes, the Department of Economics and the School of Law, like the university as a whole, send you off with gratitude and warm wishes—and with our fervent hope that you will not go far!