Daniel Markovits


Daniel Markovits is the Guido Calabresi Professor of Law at the Yale Law School, and the Founding Director of the Yale Centre for the Study of Private Law. He is the author of The Meritocracy Trap.

Early Life and 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 L.S.E. 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 the Honorable Guido Calabresi, joined the faculty at Yale.

Career and Academic Work

At Yale, Professor Markovits publishes on a range of disciplines, including on the philosophical foundations of private law, moral and political philosophy, and behavioural economics.
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.”
He then authored "The Meritocracy Trap", places meritocracy at the centre 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 best-seller list, and was widely praised. Michael Sandel called it "an important, impressive critique of the meritocracy-backed version of inequality that prevails today".
Markovits also writes for the Atlantic about how the middle class suffers in the current economy.

Major works