Oren Bar-Gill LL.M. ’01 S.J.D. ’05, the William J. Friedman and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor of Law and Economics at Harvard Law School, has received the Best Paper Prize from the American Law and Economics Association.

Announced in May, the prize honors his paper “(Mis)perceptions of Law in Consumer Markets”, published last year in the American Law and Economics Review. Co-authored by Kevin Davis, the Beller Family Professor of Business Law at New York University School of Law, the paper explores “the reasons to believe that consumers’ behavior is sometimes influenced by systematic misperceptions of legal norms that govern product quality.”

Bar-Gill’s scholarship focuses on the law and economics of contracts and contracting. His work draws upon the disciplines of law, economics and psychology. A pioneer bringing psychological realism into the economic analysis of law, Bar-Gill addresses consumer and credit card debt and other current issues.

He has published widely in law reviews and journals, including the Journal of Legal Studies, Cornell Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, and many more. His work is widely cited, and he has placed among the top 100 most cited faculty in the Social Science Research Network.

His book, “Seduction by Contract: Law, Economics, and Psychology in Consumer Markets,” has been influential since its publication in 2012.

Bar-Gill joined the HLS faculty in 2014. Last year, he delivered a chair lecture titled “Frontiers of Consumer Law,” on being named the William J. Friedman and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor of Law and Economics.

He received his B.A. in Economics from Tel-Aviv University, from which he also earned an M.A. in Law and Economics, an LL.B. in Law, and a Ph.D. in Economics.

He received his LL.M. from Harvard Law School in 2001 and his S.J.D. from HLS in 2005. At HLS, he was an Olin Fellow from 2000 to 2004, and in 2003, he received the Olin Prize for Best Paper in Law and Economics. He was also a Fellow in The Society of Fellows at Harvard University from 2002-2004.

Prior to joining the faculty at HLS, Bar-Gill was a professor at NYU, where he was also co-director of NYU’s Center for Law, Economics and Organization.