Omri Ben-Shahar

About

Omri Ben-Shahar is the Leo and Eileen Herzel Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School and serves as the Kearney Director of the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics. He earned his PhD in Economics and SJD from Harvard University in 1995, and his BA and LLB from the Hebrew University in 1990. Prior to his current position, he was the Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law and Economics at the University of Michigan, where he also founded and directed the Olin Center for Law and Economics. His professional experience includes teaching at Tel-Aviv University, serving as a member of Israel's Antitrust Court, and clerking at the Supreme Court of Israel. Ben-Shahar's research primarily focuses on contract law, data technology regulation, and consumer protection. He has authored several books, including 'Personalized Law: Different Rules for Different People' and 'More Than You Wanted to Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure,' and is involved in the development of the Restatement of Consumer Contracts through the American Law Institute. His teaching encompasses contracts, trademark law, insurance law, consumer law, law-and-AI, sales law, e-commerce, food law, law and economics, and game theory and the law.

Selected publications

• Personalized Law

  2021-06-16 · 39 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract We live in a world of one-size-fits-all law. People are different, but the laws that govern them are uniform. “Personalized Law”—rules that vary person by person—will change that. Here is a vision of a brave new world, where each person is bound by their own personally tailored law. “Reasonable person” standards would be replaced by a multitude of personalized commands, each individual with their own “reasonable you” rule. Skilled doctors would be held to higher standards of care; the m…

  PublisherDOI

• Personalized Law: Different Rules for Different People

  2021-05-17 · 30 citations

  book1st author

  Should uniformity of legal rules give way to personalized law? Should different people be bound by the own personally tailored law? The “reasonable person” standard would be replaced by a multitude of personalized “reasonable you” commands. Skilled doctors would be held to higher standards of care, vulnerable consumers would receive stronger protections, age licensing to engage in risky activity, like driving or the purchase of alcohol, would vary according to each person’s idiosyncratic risk, a…

  Publisher

• Misprioritized Information: A Theory of Manipulation

  The Journal of Legal Studies · 2023-06-01 · 22 citations

  articleSenior author

  This paper lays a foundation for a new theory of manipulation based on the misprioritization of (truthful) information. Since consumers review only a subset of all available information, firms can harm consumers by prioritizing information that maximizes firms’ profits but has a smaller impact on the utility that consumers stand to gain from the purchase. Moreover, the distortions due to misprioritized information can arise not only from firms’ boastful disclosures but also from the warnings and…

  PublisherDOI

• Privacy Protection, At What Cost? Exploring the Regulatory Resistance to Data Technology in Auto Insurance

  The Journal of Legal Analysis · 2023-08-23 · 15 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Regulatory and sociological resistance to new market-driven technologies, particularly to those that rely on collection and analysis of personal data, is prevalent even in cases where the technology creates large social value and saves lives. This article is a case study of such tragic technology resistance, focusing on tracking devices in cars which allow auto insurers to monitor how policyholders drive and adjust the premiums accordingly. Growing empirical work reveals that such “usag…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Searching for the Common Law: The Quantitative Approach of the Restatement of Consumer Contracts

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  In 2012, the American Law Institute asked us to serve as reporters for a new Restatement of Consumer Contracts. Recognizing that many innovations in American contract law in the past generation occurred in the area of consumer transactions, the project seemed timely and challenging. We discovered that many of these innovations are controversial and seemingly subject to conflicting approaches in the case law and heated debates among commentators. We also discovered that prior attempts to devise a…

  PublisherDOI

Awards & honors

• Israeli Democracy Institute Fellow (1995-1998)
• Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law and Economics at the Unive…
• Leo and Eileen Herzel Distinguished Service Professor of Law…

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