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Henry G. Manne

Henry G. Manne (1928–2015) was dean emeritus and university professor emeritus at George Mason University School of Law. He died Jan. 17, 2015.

Manne was one of the founders of modern law & economics. His scholarship focused on corporate and securities law, the economic analysis of legal rules, the market for corporate control, insider trading, and the structure of legal institutions. His work helped introduce economic reasoning into mainstream legal scholarship and judicial thinking.

He argued that corporate takeovers discipline management and allocate resources more efficiently, a thesis first developed in his article “Mergers and the Market for Corporate Control.” His book “Insider Trading and the Stock Market” challenged prevailing assumptions about insider-trading regulation and reshaped academic debate. He also co-authored “Wall Street in Transition” (with Edmund Solomon) and wrote extensively on legal education and free-market institutions. The Liberty Fund later published “The Collected Works of Henry G. Manne” in three volumes.

At George Mason, Manne redesigned legal education around economic reasoning. As dean, he built a law school organized around a law & economics curriculum and recruited faculty committed to interdisciplinary research. After stepping down from the deanship, he continued as a foundation professor.

Following retirement, Manne became a distinguished visiting professor at Ave Maria School of Law.

Earlier, he directed and relocated the Law & Economics Center, an institution he founded and developed at the University of Miami and later at Emory University before bringing it to George Mason. Through the center’s economics-training programs for judges and professors, he helped introduce economic analysis into federal courts and legal academia.

Before that, he taught at Emory University, the University of Miami, the University of Rochester, George Washington University, the University of Wisconsin, and Saint Louis University. Early in his career, he practiced law in Chicago and served in the U.S. Air Force Judge Advocate General’s Corps.

Manne also created the Economics Institute for Law Professors and the John M. Olin Fellows Program, which trained economists to become legal scholars and influenced generations of law & economics researchers. He frequently contributed opinion essays to the Wall Street Journal and advised organizations including the Cato Institute, Liberty Fund, and the Mont Pelerin Society.

The American Law and Economics Association recognized Manne as one of the field’s founders and named him an honorary life member. The Henry G. Manne Moot Court Competition in Law & Economics and the Henry G. Manne Program in Law & Economics Studies at George Mason bear his name. The Commonwealth of Virginia also honored him as a cultural laureate.

Manne earned a bachelor’s from Vanderbilt University, a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, a master of laws from Yale Law School, and a doctor of juridical science from Yale Law School. He also received honorary Doctor of Laws degrees from Seattle University, Universidad Francisco Marroquín, and George Mason University.