Anup Malani
Anup Malani is the Lee and Brena Freeman Professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He is on leave from the University, serving as Director for Policy at the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud and as Chief Economist of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in Washington, DC. Before beginning his academic career, he clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Malani’s research spans health economics, law and economics, development economics, biology, and demography. His health economics research examines the value of medical innovation, healthcare finance (including the role of insurance and credit), and healthcare fraud. His law and economics research empirically estimates the effects and welfare consequences of legal interventions and studies how judges make decisions. His development economics work includes a large randomized trial of expanding public health insurance in India and a documentary on urban slums in India, titled Basti. His biological work has modeled the impact of vaccines on the evolution of seasonal influenza in the U.S. and includes large-scale serological and cellular immunity surveys of Covid-19 in India. His demography research measures fertility decline.
Much of Malani’s research focuses on methodology. His econometrics work has examined anticipation effects, selection into clinical trials, and spillovers in randomized trials. He applies mathematical and statistical methods to evolutionary biology, including theories of developmental constraints and the predictive adaptive response. He has applied techniques from meta-analysis to improve doctrinal work in law. He has used machine learning to improve the credibility of subgroup analysis in drug trials, and large language models to synthesize legal opinions and enforcement actions.
Malani has taught a wide array of classes in law, economics, and policy. These include corporate law, bankruptcy law, securities law, insurance law, health law, food and drug law, and the legal canon. He has also taught general microeconomics, law and economics (including at the PhD level), and development economics, as well as specialized classes on blockchain, federal budget policy, and the Federal Reserve.
Malani is a Professor (courtesy) at the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago, a Research Associate (healthcare and development) at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the founding Faculty Director of the International Innovation Corps at the Harris School of Public Policy. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, was a member of the Covid Crisis Group, and has twice won the Emergent Ventures Prize.
He has a J.D. and a Ph.D. (economics) from the University of Chicago (advisors: Gary Becker, Tomas Philipson, and Willard Manning).
Recent and Selected Publications
Recent
2026
2025
- CaseSumm: A Large-Scale Dataset for Long-Context Summarization from U.S. Supreme Court OpinionsIn NAACL Findings, 2025