An ABF Perspective on James Heckman and His Scholarship

Abstract

The occasion of the awarding of the Nobel prize provides a nice opportunity to consider the 10 years that James Heckman has served as a senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation. Despite his travels, Heckman has participated actively in the life of the ABF. Not only has he been quite active in our research committee, which oversees new projects, but he has also prepared exhaustively and participated fully in our annual meetings and decisions regarding the recruitment of new research fellows and doctoral fellows. My purpose here, however, is not to focus on his activities at the ABF but rather to contribute some comments on his place in the ABF scheme of things-what it means to have this Nobel prize-winning economist working as a senior research fellow at an institution affiliated with the legal profession. The mission of the ABF is deceptively simple to state. It is to produce the highest-quality research possible dealing with law, legal institutions, and legal processes. It should therefore be obvious that Heckman fits the mission quite well. The Nobel prize only confirms what was already well understood. He is a an academic superstar. The institutional context of the ABF, however, is more complicated. On the one hand, the ABF is a creature of the organized bar, the American Bar Association, and it is funded largely by the American Bar Endowment, which relies to a great extent on the sale of insurance to ABA members. Our position in the ABA family, indeed, means that members of the organized bar often want to know what the use of the ABF research is to practicing lawyers or at least to the legal profession. Part of my role as director is to promote research within the ABF that