About Chris William
Chris William Sanchirico is an academic whose work crosses tax law, economics, and public policy. He holds an A.B. from Princeton (1980) and both a J.D. and a Ph.D. from Yale (each conferred in 1994). Those degrees reflect training in law, tax policy, and law-and-economics approaches that have shaped his career in legal education and scholarship.
He moved into academia shortly after finishing his graduate work. In 1995 he joined Columbia University as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics. He spent time on the faculty at the University of Virginia School of Law beginning in 2002. In 2003 he took on a joint appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, serving as Professor of Law, Business, and Public Policy at the Law School and the Wharton School’s Business and Public Policy Department. He became co-director of Penn’s Center for Tax Law and Policy in 2007 and was named the Samuel A. Blank Professor of Law in 2009.
Sanchirico’s scholarly interests are grounded in tax law but extend into the broader terrain of law and economics. His work explores how rules and institutions shape fiscal outcomes and how economic models can inform legal design. He has written on tax policy and related doctrinal questions, often bringing formal economic reasoning to bear on legal problems. His training in economics and law allows him to move between quantitative argument and doctrinal analysis.
He participates in professional communities that reflect those interdisciplinary ties. He holds memberships in the National Tax Association, the International Institute of Public Finance, the International Fiscal Association, the American Law and Economics Association, the Game Theory Society, and the Association of American Law Schools. Those affiliations keep him engaged with both economic and legal scholarship and with ongoing debates about fiscal institutions.
Colleagues and students have known him as a teacher who places economic tools and legal doctrine in conversation. He has steered research programs at Penn and helped shape curricular offerings that bridge the law school and Wharton. His current work centers on tax law, law and economics, and public policy.
