Introduction

In the summer of 2023, Professor Yoon-Ho Alex Lee of Northwestern Law School called Karen Crocco, my father’s assistant of forty years (and Executive Secretary of the American Law and Economics Association), to ask whether he might organize a Festschrift honoring George. My father, who had always insisted on keeping the focus on ideas rather than people and egos, reflected that, despite his reluctance, an event like this would be a good step toward his upcoming retirement. John Donohue of Stanford Law School and Danny Sokol of USC Law joined Alex Lee in organizing the event. Roberta Romano secured funding from Yale Law School’s Oscar M. Ruebhausen fund. Karen Crocco volunteered to coordinate the conference. Yale Journal on Regulation agreed to publish papers in a Symposium issue. I tried to support these efforts behind the scenes and was asked to write this introduction to the issue.

The Conference for George Priest was held at Yale Law School on September 6-7, 2024. As the papers in this volume reveal, the event was intellectually rigorous and stimulating. In keeping with the breadth of my father’s scholarship, the papers span a tremendously wide-ranging set of topics from insurance law and torts to university athletics, legal institutions, and capitalism. For those present, the event had a palpable warmth in spirit as a group of friends and colleagues in the field celebrated their mentor and Yale Law School as a home of scholarly rigor. My father and my mother Kathy loved entertaining, and insisted on hosting the conference dinners at their house, a place most participants knew well from gatherings during their time at Yale. It was apparent to all that my father was not in the best of health, which likely added to the family-like atmosphere throughout the event. None of us knew, of course, that my father would only have a few months more to live. The memorialization of that conference in these pages is more meaningful because now we know that it was lucky timing to convene together with my father while he was able to be in attendance.

My father was deeply proud to be connected to everyone at the conference. He missed the close friends and former students who were not able to attend. It is tremendous to have this volume of essays as a closing chapter on a career where he worked very hard, transformed his fields of inquiry, stayed true to his values, and admired the accomplishments of dear friends and former students.