Morgan Ricks has been named Vanderbilt Law School’s Enterprise Scholar for 2019-21. The two-year designation provides additional research funding to promote the career development of promising young scholars on Vanderbilt’s law faculty.
Ricks is the author of The Money Problem: Rethinking Financial Regulation (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and has published articles in law and peer-reviewed journals addressing shadow banking, financial reform and monetary stability. In his most recent article, “Money as Infrastructure” (Columbia Law Review, 2019), he suggests that tighter limits on money creation would reduce the amount of regulation needed to maintain financial stability.
Before joining Vanderbilt’s law faculty in 2012, Ricks worked as a senior policy adviser and financial restructuring expert in the Domestic Finance Division of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. He earned his J.D. magna cum laude at Harvard Law School after earning his B.A. in history summa cum laude at Dartmouth College. He practiced in the corporate group at Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz in New York before working in the investment banking division of Merrill Lynch & Co. and in the principal strategies group at Citadel Investment Group. At Vanderbilt, Ricks is affiliated with the Law and Business Program and teaches Corporations and Business Entities, Regulation of Financial Institutions, and two seminars, The Legal Structure of Capitalism and Regulating Financial Stability.
“Morgan’s research explores financial regulation from an innovative perspective, and I’m glad the Enterprise Fund enables us to support the important work of rising scholars here at Vanderbilt,” said Chris Guthrie, Dean and John Wade-Kent Syverud Professor of Law.
The Enterprise Faculty Fund was created through a gift from Robert S. Reder ’78, a professor of the practice of law who has taught courses in Vanderbilt’s Law and Business Program since 2012. Reder is a retired partner of Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy, where he practiced in the firm’s mergers and acquisitions group for 33 years.
Ricks is the third law faculty member to hold the designation of Enterprise Scholar. Previous scholars include Sean Seymore, Timothy Meyer and Yesha Yadav.