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Eduardo Peñalver ’99JD:
Ithaca homecoming

Eduardo Peñalver ’99JD teaches property law at the University of Chicago, birthplace of the free-market-oriented law and economics movement. A libertarian anti-regulator, perhaps, who sees government land-use restrictions as an impermissible intrusion on owners' rights?

Perhaps not. Peñalver "is considered to be a leading voice in the 'progressive property' movement," says a Cornell University release announcing his appointment this week as dean of Cornell Law School. He'll be the Ivy League's first Latino law dean.

After completing his undergraduate work at Cornell, Peñalver studied philosophy and theology as a Rhodes Scholar; attended Yale Law School; clerked for former Yale Law dean Guido Calabresi ’53, ’58LLB—a founder of the liberal wing of law and economics—on the US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals; then clerked for US Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens. A visiting professor at Yale in 2005-06, he then taught at Cornell until 2012, when he went to Chicago.

With Sonia Katyal, Peñalver wrote a book called Property Outlaws, provocatively subtitled How Squatters, Pirates, and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership, which "explores the role of disobedience in the evolution of property law," the Cornell release says.

He'll return to Ithaca—home of a food co-op, a biodiesel co-op, a campus full of housing co-ops, and a barter-based local "currency" called Ithaca Hours—on July 1.

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The Yale Alumni Magazine is published by Yale Alumni Publications Inc., an alumni-based nonprofit that is not run by Yale University. Its content does not necessarily reflect the views of the university administration.

Filed under Eduardo Peñalver, Cornell, Law School
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