Nobel Laureate Dr. Vernon L. Smith Honored with New Portrait in Fowler School of Law Lobby

Nobel Laureate Dr. Vernon L. Smith in front of his new portrait in the Fowler School of Law

“We celebrate Vernon Smith’s presence on the faculty of the Dale E. Fowler School of Law with a permanent place for his portrait in our atrium… We recognize the tremendous honor it has been for the Dale E. Fowler School of Law that Vernon Smith is our colleague. Our students have benefited greatly from his insight, patience, and constant inquisitiveness. Our faculty has been inspired by one of the greatest minds of our time. Vernon Smith has constantly explored the rule of law so that humankind can improve what they have by voluntary exchange, and thereby have not just the desire to contemplate the infinite, but the means to do so.” – Dean Tom Campbell
(See the entirety of Dean Campbell’s remarks below.)

Dr. Smith and his colleague,
Dr. Bart J. Wilson
, currently co-teach the popular
Spontaneous Order and the Law course
at Fowler School of Law. This course shows how experimental economics can be used to understand the emergence of spontaneous, self‐generating orders (out of apparent chaos) in law and economics, using a combination of hands‐on learning in laboratory experiments and Socratic roundtable discussions of readings. Students explore how experimental economics can be used to understand exchange systems and the emergence of rules of law that undergird exchange.

Smith and Wilson also run Chapman University’s globally recognized
Economic Science Institute (ESI)
. Started as an alternative, more hands-on method to economic education, the ESI is an academic center that uses the laboratory method of inquiry to study the role human institutions play in creating social rules and order. The ESI also builds and tests market and management systems, with research that spans the fields of accounting, economics, finance, information systems, engineering, psychology, neuroscience, computer science and philosophy.

Nobel Laureate Dr. Vernon L. Smith

About Dr. Vernon L. Smith

Dr. Smith was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002
for his groundbreaking work in experimental economics. He has joint appointments with Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law and Argyros School of Business & Economics.
Learn more about Dr. Vernon L. Smith
.

Dean Campbell’s Prepared Comments about Dr. Vernon L. Smith at the Unveiling

“We celebrate Vernon Smith’s presence on the faculty of the Dale E. Fowler School of Law with a permanent place for his portrait in our atrium. Just across this lobby, you can read the inscription Dale E. Fowler authored when he and his wife made their gift to our School of Law. It reads as though we were creating a law school in the image of Vernon Smith. Dale Fowler’s words speak of the importance of freedom to our country and our world. I invite you all to walk over at the end of your gathering this afternoon, and read those words.

The rule of law, which we study here, protects individual liberty so that each of us can choose to study, to believe, and to do that which most excites us, consistent only with the obligation not to interfere with an equal degree of freedom for others to do the same. The rule of law also protects economic freedom, so that societies might have the means to surpass the struggle for basic necessities and thus be able to pursue improvements in the human condition. A great law school will promote both freedoms.

In Vernon Smith, we show our appreciation for a scholar whose life’s work vindicates both kinds of freedom. Vernon’s economic contribution draws from the Austrian school and from pragmatism. It is suspicious of government, just like the founders of our nation. It seeks to foster exchange between free individuals, as a way of bettering each.

To study law is to understand the mechanisms by which government tries to control individuals, but also the means by which individuals can stay maximally free from control. To study economics is to understand the allocation of scarcity, to make the most for society of what it has. Combining the two creates a pragmatic approach to distributing the goods and services of a modern society facilitated by respect for individual liberty, with the right to hold property, and to keep what we earn, as fundamental aspects of that liberty.

Studying law without economics is an exercise in utopia. It is divorced from practicality. Studying economics without law is a parade of simultaneous equations, pleasing to the electrical engineer side of Vernon Smith, but ending at its best only in an elegant mathematical solution. Defining the ‘should’ is the business of law. Taking the ‘should’ to the ‘will’ is the business of economics. Vernon cares deeply about both.

Today, we recognize the tremendous honor it has been for the Dale E. Fowler School of Law that Vernon Smith is our colleague. Our students have benefited greatly from his insight, patience, and constant inquisitiveness. Our faculty has been inspired by one of the greatest minds of our time. Vernon Smith has constantly explored the rule of law so that humankind can improve what they have by voluntary exchange, and thereby have not just the desire to contemplate the infinite, but the means to do so.”