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Jens Frankenreiter

Associate Professor of Law

Jens Frankenreiter‘s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of business law, contract law, and comparative law. His work draws on methods from economics, statistics, and data science to improve our understanding of contracting, private and public lawmaking, and legal institutions. A particular focus of his work is on the use of large amounts of texts and other forms of big data. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in leading academic journals, among them the Journal of Legal Studies and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.

Professor Frankenreiter holds a Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School. Before coming to WashU, he was a Senior Research Fellow at Max Planck Bonn, a Visiting Associate Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership.

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  • Education
    • Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland, Ph.D., 2016
    • Harvard Law School, LL.M., 2015
    • University of Bonn and LMU Munich, 2010
  • Publications

    Author’s SSRN Page

    Representative Publications

    • Are Lawyers’ Case Selection Decisions Biased? A Field Experiment on Access to Justice, 52 Journal of Legal Studies 273 (2023) (with Michael A. Livermore)
    • Cost-Based California Effects, 39 Yale Journal on Regulation 1098 (2022)
    • Cleaning Corporate Governance, 170 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 1 (2021) (with Cathy Hwang, Yaron Nili and Eric Talley) (selected as one of the Top 10 Corporate and Securities Articles of 2022)
    • Computational Methods in Legal Analysis, 16 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 39 (2020) (with Michael A. Livermore)
    • Forum Selling Abroad, 92 Southern California Law Review 487 (2019) (with Stefan Bechtold and Dan Klerman)
    • The Politics of Citations at the ECJ: Policy Preferences of EU Member State Governments and the Citation Behavior of Members of the European Court of Justice, 14 Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 813 (2017)
  • Honors and Awards
    • Distinguished Referee 2018–2020 and 2020-2022, Journal of Legal Studies
    • ETH Medal (2017)
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