About

Michael A. Heller is the Lawrence A. Wien Professor of Real Estate Law and Vice Dean of Academic Affairs at Columbia Law School. He holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School and an A.B. from Harvard University. Heller is recognized as one of the preeminent scholars working on private law theory today, with a focus on issues related to ownership, property rights, and law and philosophy. His research explores who gets what and why, spanning areas such as innovation and entrepreneurship, corporate governance, biomedical research policy, real estate development, land ownership among African-American and Native American communities, and post-socialist economic transition. Heller has authored influential books including 'Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives,' which reveals the six simple stories used to claim ownership, and 'The Gridlock Economy,' which discusses how excessive property rights can hinder markets and innovation. His work often examines ownership dilemmas and the rules that govern property and contractual relationships, contributing significantly to legal scholarship and public understanding of ownership issues. He has served as a faculty member at Columbia Law School since 2002, previously taught at the University of Michigan Law School, and has also taught at NYU, UCLA, and Yale Law Schools. His professional background includes working at the World Bank on post-socialist legal transition and clerking for Judge James Browning of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Research topics

• Business
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Computer Security
• Artificial Intelligence
• Finance
• Economic system
• Market economy
• Economics

Selected publications

• Genuinely Liberal Contract Law

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Liberal Contract Theory -- Part 1 of Freedom of Contract

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Property Rights in Health Care Resources

  2024-10-18

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The “tragedy of the commons” metaphor helps explain why people overuse shared resources. However, the recent proliferation of intellectual property rights in biomedical research suggests a different tragedy, an “anticommons” in which people underuse scarce resources because too many owners can block each other. Privatization of biomedical research must be more carefully deployed to sustain both upstream research and downstream product development. Otherwise, more intellectual property rights may lead paradoxically to fewer useful products for improving human health.

  PublisherDOI

• Autonomy Defaults

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Can contract emancipate? contract theory and the law of work

  Theoretical Inquiries in Law · 2023-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Contract and employment law have grown apart. Long ago, each side gave up on the other. In this Article, we reunite them to the betterment of both. In brief, we demonstrate the emancipatory potential of contract for the law of work. Today, the dominant contract theories assume a widget transaction between substantively equal parties. If this were an accurate description of what contract is, then contract law would be right to expel workers. Worker protections would indeed be better regulated by—and relegated to—employment and labor law. But contract law is not what contract theorists claim. Neither is contract law what the dominant employment theorists fear—a domain that necessarily misses the constitutive place of work in people’s life-plans and overlooks the systemic vulnerability of workers to their employers. Contract, we contend, is not work law’s canonical “other.” Rightly understood, contract is an autonomy-enhancing device, one founded on the fundamental liberal commitment of reciprocal respect for self-determination. From this “choice theory” perspective, the presumed opposition between employment and contract law dissolves. We show that many employment law doctrines are not external to contract, but are instead entailed in liberal contract itself. Grounding worker protections in contract theory has two salutary effects. First, it offers workers more secure protection than that afforded by their reliance on momentary public-law compromises. Second, it reveals contract’s emancipatory potential for all of us—not just as workers, but also as widget buyers. Contract can empower, and employment can show the way.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Tragedy of the Anticommons: A Concise Introduction and Lexicon

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Sicherheit in der Berliner Justiz

  Berliner Anwaltsblatt · 2023-06-17

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Conclusion:

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2021-04-13

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Corporate Governance Lessons from Transition Economy Reforms

  2021 · 20 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Economic system
  • Business

  Introduction vii Part I: Framework Chapter One: What Is Good Corporate Governance? by Merritt B. Fox and Michael A. Heller 3 Part II: The Elements of Good Corporate Governance: Law Chapter Two: Patterns of Legal Change: Shareholder and Creditor Rights in Transition Economies by Katharina Pistor 35 Chapter Three: The Common Law and Economic Growth: Hayek Might Be Right by Paul G. Mahoney 84 Part III: The Elements of Good Corporate Governance: Owners and Managers Chapter Four: Russian Privatization and Corporate Governance: What Went Wrong? by Bernard Black, Reinier Kraakman, and Anna Tarassova 113 Chapter Five: Why Ownership Matters: Entrepreneurship and the Restructuring of Enterprises in Central Europe by Roman Frydman, Marek Hessel, and Andrzej Rapaczynski 194 Part IV: The Elements of Good Corporate Governance: Stock Markets Chapter Six: Corporate Governance in Transitional Economies: Lessons from the Prewar Japanese Cotton Textile Industry by Yoshiro Miwa and J. Mark Ramseyer 231 Chapter Seven: Privatization and Corporate Governance: The Lessons from Securities Market Failure by John C. Coffee, Jr. 265 Chapter Eight: The Information Content of Stock Markets: Why Do Emerging Markets Have Synchronous Stock Price Movements? by Randall Morck, Bernard Yeung, and Wayne Yu 315 Part V: What Does Transition Contribute to Theory? Chapter Nine: Conclusion: The Unexplored Role of Initial Conditions by Merritt B. Fox and Michael A. Heller 367 List of Contributors 405 Index 407

  DOI

• Property Transitions

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-03-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Time plays a key role in this book. The last two chapters discussed two reasons why time matters to the life of property: over time, owners effect voluntary changes to property in order to carry out their life plans and the state imposes involuntary changes (from the individual owner’s perspective) in response to changing circumstances, shifting needs and wants, and revised public goals. For the state to function – and to remain justified on liberal principles – the government must have this ability to adjust ownership. However, state-initiated transitions to ownership – implemented through governments’ police and takings powers – are potentially devastating to the owners’ ability to be the authors of their own lives.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Lawrence A. Wien

  Boston University

  82 shared

• Henry Smith

  University of Cambridge

  81 shared

• Gary D. Libecap

  81 shared

• Daniel Kelly

  81 shared

• Howard L. Rosenthal

  81 shared

• Edwyna Harris

  81 shared

• Paul Liacos

  Northwestern University

  81 shared

• Anne Lee

  Beverly Hills Cancer Center

  81 shared

Education

• B.A., Public Policy

  University of Chicago

  1973

• Other

  Harvard Law School

  1976

• Ph.D., Public Policy

  Harvard University

  1981

Awards & honors

• L. Hart Wright Award for excellence in teaching at Universit…