Jeffrey Stake is Robert A. Lucas Chair of Law at the Maurer School of Law, the past president and founding vice president of SEAL, the Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law (sealsite.org), a co-founder of the Midwest Law and Economics Association (MLEA), and a member of the Indiana University Cognitive Science Program.
Stake’s interdisciplinary research focuses primarily on property law, but also includes topics ranging from the First Amendment and divorce law to law school grading and rankings. One article applies evolutionary analysis in search of the roots of property law, arguing that some rules of property reflect basic human instincts. It was published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the oldest continuously publishing scientific journal in the world. Another article, with Owen Jones and Erin O’Connor, compares the uses of biology and economics in analysis of the law.
Stake teaches property, wills and trusts, and land-use controls. His engaging and popular style has led to visiting appointments at Illinois, Colorado, Georgetown, Paris II (Panthéon-Assas), the Max Planck Institute, and Peking University School of Transnational Law. At Indiana Maurer Law, he has received the Leon Wallace Teaching Award and two Trustees Teaching Awards.
