Morgan Ricks

Herman O. Loewenstein Chair in Law

Morgan Ricks studies financial regulation. He is the author of The Money Problem: Rethinking Financial Regulation (University of Chicago Press, 2016), and a co-author of Networks, Platforms, and Utilities: Law and Policy (2022). Professor Ricks joined the Vanderbilt Law faculty in 2012 and was the 2019-21 Enterprise Scholar. Before he entered the legal academy, he was a senior policy advisor and financial restructuring expert at the U.S. Treasury Department from 2009 to 2010, where he focused primarily on financial stability initiatives and capital markets policy. Before joining the Treasury Department, he was a risk-arbitrage trader at Citadel Investment Group, a Chicago-based hedge fund. He previously served as a vice president in the investment banking division of Merrill Lynch & Co., where he specialized in strategic and capital-raising transactions for financial services companies. He began his career as a mergers and acquisitions attorney at Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz.

Representative Publications

• "Regulation and the Geography of Inequality," 70 Duke Law Journal 1763 (2021) (with Christopher Serkin and Ganesh Sitaraman)
  Full Text | SSRN | HEIN
• “Federal Corporate Law and the Business of Banking,” University of Chicago Law Review 1361 (2021) (with Lev Menand)
• “FedAccounts: Digital Dollars,” 89 George Washington Law Review 113 (2021) (with John Crawford and Lev Menand)
  Full Text | SSRN | HEIN
• “Money, Private Law and Macroeconomic Disasters,” 83 Law and Contemporary Problems 65 (2020)
  Full Text | HEIN | WWW
• "Money as Infrastructure," 2018 Columbia Business Law Review 757
  Full Text | SSRN | HEIN
• "Organizational Law as Commitment Device," 70 Vanderbilt Law Review 1303 (2017). Reprinted in 59 Corporate Practice Commentator 669 (2018)
  Full Text | SSRN | HEIN | WWW
• The Money Problem: Rethinking Financial Regulation, University of Chicago Press (2016)
  Full Text | WWW
• "Entry Restriction, Shadow Banking, and the Structure of Monetary Institutions," Journal of Financial Regulation (2016)
  Full Text | SSRN
• "Money and (Shadow) Banking: A Thought Experiment," 31 Review of Banking and Financial Law 731 (2012)
  Full Text | SSRN | HEIN
• "Regulating Money Creation After the Crisis," 1 Harvard Business Law Review 75 (2011)
  Full Text | HEIN | WWW