About Daniel R.
Daniel R. Fischel built a career at the crossroads of law and business. He is an academic who has spent decades teaching, writing and advising on issues that touch corporate decision-making and markets.
He graduated from Brown University in 1972 with a bachelor’s degree in American history and a minor in economics. He then earned his J.D. from The University of Chicago Law School in 1977. Those formative years set the stage for a sequence of clerkships that placed him inside the federal appellate system and the Supreme Court.
After law school he clerked for Judge Thomas E. Fairchild, then chief judge of the Seventh Circuit, beginning in 1977. He spent the following year as a law clerk to Associate Justice Potter Stewart of the United States Supreme Court. Those early experiences exposed him to complex federal litigation and constitutional questions at the highest level.
In 1979 he worked as a lawyer at Levy and Erens in Chicago. He moved into academia in the early 1980s. In 1982 he joined Northwestern University School of Law as a professor of law. Five years later he took a faculty position at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business as a professor of law and business.
Over the years his career has straddled law schools and business schools. In 2006 he was named the Lee and Brena Freeman Professor Emeritus of Law and Business and a senior lecturer at The University of Chicago Law School. His appointments reflect a persistent engagement with questions about corporate governance, securities regulation and the economic analysis of legal rules.
His writing and teaching address how legal rules shape firm behavior, shareholder rights and market incentives. Students remember his classes for a blend of doctrinal detail and economic reasoning. Colleagues note his willingness to take on empirical problems and to test theoretical claims against real-world data.
He has kept a visible role at the University of Chicago Law School in recent years, teaching courses that draw on both law and economic analysis. In classrooms and in print he continues to examine corporate law, securities and related economic questions. As of 2026 he serves as Lee and Brena Freeman Professor Emeritus of Law and Business and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, where he remains active in teaching and scholarship on corporate law and securities.
