Morgan Ricks has been appointed to the Herman O. Loewenstein Chair in Law.
Ricks’ appointment to the chair was announced by Chris Guthrie, Dean and John Wade-Kent Syverud Professor of Law.
The Herman O. Loewenstein Chair in Law was established in 2006 through the estate of Herman O. Loewenstein, BA’50, JD’52, to support a faculty member in the fields of constitutional and commercial law at the Vanderbilt Law School. Mr. Loewenstein was a loyal Vanderbilt alumnus and supporter.
“Morgan’s pioneering work in the area of financial regulation and banking law has had a massive influence on the course of scholarship in the wake of the Great Recession,” said Dean Guthrie. “Herman Loewenstein’s generosity allows us to recognize Morgan’s significant contributions to the academy and the Law School, for which I’m very thankful.”
Ricks ranks among the nation’s top experts in financial regulation. His book The Money Problem: Rethinking Financial Regulation argues for a reform of the American monetary system that treats private money as cash deposits, formally backed by the U.S. Treasury. He has written about shadow banking, digital currency, and corporate regulation. Ricks co-authored the textbook Networks, Platforms & Utilities with Sitaraman and Lev Menand, which aims to reinvigorate a long-dormant field of legal study. His most recent work focuses on Mergers & Acquisitions activity.
Professor Ricks joined the Vanderbilt Law faculty in 2012. 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.
