Speaker Biographies

Doug G. Lichtman joined the law faculty of the University of Chicago in 1998 and was tenured in 2001. Professor Lichtman's research considers how technology will challenge, reinforce, and redefine traditional legal rules. Specific areas of expertise include patent, copyright, and trademark law; telecommunications regulation; information economics; and a variety of issues related to technology startups and the Internet. His work has been featured in The Journal of Law & Economics, The Journal of Legal Studies, and the Harvard Business Review. He is co-author of Telecommunications Law and Policy (Carolina Academic Press, 2001), a textbook that investigates the federal regulatory regime applicable to broadcast television, cable television, radio, telephony, and advanced services like the provision of Internet access over the cable infrastructure. He is also an editor at The Journal of Law & Economics.

Robert W. Hahn is co-founder and executive director of the American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Joint Center and a resident scholar at AEI. Previously, he worked for the Council of Economic Advisers. He also has served on the faculties of Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Hahn frequently contributes to leading scholarly journals and general-interest periodicals, including The American Economic Review, The Yale Law Journal, Science, and the New York Times. He is the author of Reviving Regulatory Reform: A Global Perspective (AEI-Brookings Joint Center, 2000) and In Defense of the Economic Analysis of Regulation (AEI-Brookings Joint Center, 2005). In addition, Dr. Hahn is cofounder of the Community Preparatory School­­­­, an inner-city middle school in Providence, Rhode Island, that provides opportunities for disadvantaged youth to achieve their full potential.

Hal R. Varian is the Class of 1944 Professor at the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS), the Haas School of Business, and the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1995–2002, he served as the founding dean of SIMS. He has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Oxford University, the University of Michigan, and other universities around the world. Professor Varian is a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the Econometric Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served as co-editor of The American Economic Review and is on the editorial boards of several journals. Professor Varian has published numerous papers on economic theory, industrial organization, financial economics, econometrics, and information economics. He is the author of two major economics textbooks which have been translated into twenty-two languages. His current research has been concerned with the economics of information technology and the information economy. He is the co-author of a bestselling book on business strategy, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (Harvard Business School Press, 1998) and writes a monthly column for the the New York Times.