Program on Law & Technology @ Columbia University School of Law

Lawrence A. Wien Professor of Real Estate Law

Biography

Michael Heller teaches courses in property, land use, real estate, and international law and development. His scholarship explores property theory in a wide range of settings. For example, his work on “The Tragedy of the Anticommons,” published in the Harvard Law Review and in Science, draws on post-socialist transition and biomedical research to show how the creation of too many private property rights can be as costly as creating too few. In “The Liberal Commons,” co-authored with Hanoch Dagan and published in the Yale Law Journal, Heller explores declining black landownership in America to offer a new theory of commons property. In addition, Heller has published articles on takings law, corporate governance, restitution, and post-socialist transition in numerous journals and edited volumes.

Heller joined the Columbia faculty in 2002. During 2004-05, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. From 1994 to 2002, Heller taught at the University of Michigan Law School where he received the L. Hart Wright Award for excellence in teaching. He has been a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has co-directed corporate governance research at the University of Michigan Business School’s William Davidson Institute. Heller was a visiting professor at NYU in 2001, an Olin Senior Fellow at Columbia in 2000, and a visiting lecturer at Yale in 1991. During 1990-94, Heller worked at the World Bank on post-socialist property law transition. Heller clerked for the Honorable James R. Browning, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Harvard College.