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{{short description|American legal scholar}}{{Use mdy dates|date=January 2023}}

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| birth_place = | death_date = | death_place = | nationality = | other_names = Law professor|author}}| years_active = | known_for = The Meritocracy Trap| notable_works = }}Daniel Markovits (born August 4, 1969) is the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at the Yale Law School and the founding director of the Yale Center for the Study of Private Law.WEB,weblink Daniel Markovits - Yale Law School, www.law.yale.edu, February 9, 2024, He is the author of The Meritocracy Trap (2019).

Education

After earning a B.A. in mathematics, summa cum laude, from Yale University, Markovits received a British Marshall Scholarship to study in England, where he was awarded an M.Sc. in econometrics and mathematical economics from the London School of Economics and a B.Phil. and D.Phil. in philosophy from the University of Oxford. Markovits then returned to Yale to study law and, after clerking for Guido Calabresi, joined the faculty.

Career

At Yale, Markovits publishes on a range of disciplines, including on the philosophical foundations of private law, moral and political philosophy, and behavioral economics.WEB, Daniel Markovits - Yale Law School,weblink July 15, 2020, law.yale.edu, en, He delivered the 2015 commencement speech at the Yale Law School, in which he argued that "meritocracy now constitutes a modern-day aristocracy, one might even say, purpose-built for a world in which the greatest source of wealth is not land or factories but human capital, the free labor of skilled workers".WEB,weblink YLS 2015 Commencement: Graduates Encouraged to Ask "Where Am I Needed?"—PHOTOS, VIDEO, SPEECHES, law.yale.edu, May 18, 2015, Markovits has also published a number of articles in The Atlantic.WEB, Daniel Markovits, Daniel Markovits,weblink July 15, 2020, The Atlantic, en-US,

The Meritocracy Trap

In 2019, Markovits published his third book, The Meritocracy Trap, in which he places meritocracy at the center of rising economic inequality and social and political dysfunction. The book takes up the law, economics, and politics of human capital to identify the mechanisms through which meritocracy breeds inequality, and to expose the burdens that meritocratic inequality imposes on all who fall within meritocracy's orbit. The book figured on the Amazon bestseller list and was widely praised.BOOK,weblink The Meritocracy Trap, July 15, 2020, www.amazon.com, September 10, 2019, Penguin Books, It was not universally well-received, however. Timothy Sandefur, writing for The Objective Standard, a libertarian journal, explains that "Markovits's prescription [for the problems he addresses] is for a society in which government will reward 'uncompetitive mediocrity' instead of individual initiative, and mankind's noblest quality—the love of excellence—is regarded as a menace". Further, Sandefur argues that "Markovits's reliance on...loaded language is a good sign that his argument cannot stand—pardon the pun—on its own merits".WEB, December 18, 2020, The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits,weblink May 6, 2021, The Objective Standard, en-US,

Selected publications

• A Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Advocacy in a Democratic Age (2008)
• Contract Law and Legal Methods (Foundation Press – 2012)
• "The Distributional Preferences of an Elite", Science (2015)JOURNAL, The distributional preferences of an elite, Raymond, Fisman, Pamela, Jakiela, Shachar, Kariv, Daniel, Markovits, September 18, 2015, Science, 349, 6254, aab0096, 10.1126/science.aab0096, 26383958, free,
• The Meritocracy Trap (Penguin Press – 2019)

References

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