Chris William Sanchirico


Chris William Sanchirico is the Samuel A. Blank Professor of Law, Business and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Wharton School. He is a leading expert on tax law and policy.

Biography

Sanchirico was born in the Bronx, New York and grew up in Wayne, New Jersey where he attended the Wayne public schools. His paternal grandparents immigrated to the United States from Basilicata, Italy, a region whose contemporaneous poverty and backwardness are depicted in Carlo Levi’s classic memoir, Cristo si è fermato a Eboli.

Education

Sanchirico graduated with an A.B. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1984 after completing a 133-page long senior thesis titled "International Lending When Repayment is Endogenous." He was named one of two Woodrow Wilson Scholars in his senior year. He earned his J.D. at Yale Law School and his Ph.D. at Yale University, where his studies focused on game theory, mathematical economics, and public economics. His dissertation on game theory was published in one of the field’s leading journals, Econometrica.

Professional career

Sanchirico’s research and teaching combine mathematical and legal-institutional sophistication to a degree that is relatively rare among economists and legal scholars. He has published extensively in preeminent journals in the fields of tax law and policy, evidence, procedure, law and economics, public economics, game theory, and mathematical economics. He has presented his work widely at law schools, economics departments, business schools, and statistics departments. His course offerings include Federal Income Taxation, Taxation of Business Entities, International Taxation, Evidence, Game Theory, Intermediate Microeconomics, Mathematical Methods, and Law and Economics.
In 2009 Sanchirico visited Università di Bologna where he was Visiting Scholar at La Facoltà di Economia, Senior Fellow at Istituto di Studi Avanzati, and Erasmus Mundus Scholar. Sanchirico has served as the Chair of the Evidence Section of the Association of American Law Schools and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Law and Economics Association. Sanchirico is one of the founding Co-Directors of the University of Pennsylvania’s . He is also the founding editor of two eJournals, and , and an Advisory Editor of the University of Bologna Law Review, a general student-edited law journal published by the Department of Legal Studies of the University of Bologna.

Selected publications

Tax Law and Policy

Legal Evidence and Procedure

Game Theory and Probability