Kathryn Zeiler

Biography

Professor Kathryn Zeiler is a Nancy Barton Scholar and Professor of Law. Prior to joining the BU Law faculty in 2015, Professor Zeiler was a Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center (2003 to 2015). She has held visiting professorships at Boston College School of Law, Harvard Law School, NYU School of Law, Hebrew University Faculty of Law, and Heidelberg University Faculty of Law. Professor Zeiler teaches in the areas of tort law, health law and law and economics. She was nominated in 2021 for the Boston University Provost’s Scholar-Teacher of the Year award, and in 2025 for the Boston University Melton Teaching Award. 

Professor Zeiler’s scholarship applies economic theory and empirical methods to the study of legal issues and research questions. Her main scholarly interests include the advancement of empirical legal studies, metaresearch, importation of experimental economics results and behavioral economics theories into legal scholarship, the medical malpractice liability system, malpractice insurance markets, and patient safety. She is co-editor of the Research Handbook on Behavioral Law and Economics (2018) and has published numerous articles in journals including Connecticut Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, American Economic Review, Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, and Annual Review of Law and Social Science. She is currently working on a replication project to test the credibility of quantitative empirical studies relied on by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Professor Zeiler is a Fellow and past chair of the board of directors for the Society of Empirical Legal Studies. She was elected to serve as the 2020 to 2021 Secretary-Treasurer for the American Law and Economics Association, served as vice president in 2021 to 2022, and president and host of the association’s annual meeting in 2022 to 2023. She was elected in 2022 to a three-year term on the board of the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science and has served as vice president (2022). She was appointed in 2021 to the Advisory Board of ReplicationWiki and in 2023 to the Steering Committee of the Aumann-Fischer Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy housed at Hebrew University Law Faculty. She holds positions on the editorial boards of Behavioral Science and Policy, an academic journal, and MetaROR, a publish-review-curate platform. She served as a member of the Max Planck Institute’s Scientific Review Board for Research on Collective Goods (2011 to 2018) and as a member of the board of directors of the American Law and Economics Association (2010 to 2012). She is a regular peer-reviewer for several economics, law and economics, health policy and medical journals.

View all of Professor Zeiler’s activities and engagements.

News

• Professor Zeiler serves on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Steering Committee on Lawyer Well-Being (subcommittee on law student well-being)
• Professor Zeiler elected to the Board of the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science
• Professor Zeiler co-organizes pre-conference workshop on How to Produce Transparent Empirical Research held at the 2022 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies