Editor's note: It was previously announced that Shankar Balasubramanian of the University of Cambridge would be among this year's recipients. His honorary degree will be conferred at a later date.
The University of Chicago will award honorary degrees to two distinguished scholars on June 6 during its Convocation celebration of the Class of 2026: economic and legal scholar Louis Kaplow and historian and archaeologist Greg Woolf.
Louis Kaplow, the Finn M.W. Caspersen and Household International Professor of Law and Economics at Harvard Law School, will receive the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.
Kaplow has made groundbreaking contributions to the study of law and economics, taxation and public economics, industrial organization and antitrust law, and welfare economics. His foundational work has employed formal and informal economic reasoning to analyze the effects of legal rules and institutions as well as to provide new conceptual frameworks that revise central legal and economic understandings. His most recent scholarship rethinks optimal income taxation, merger analysis, and competition regulation of dominant firms.
Kaplow is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received lifetime achievement awards for scholarship from the National Tax Association and from the American Law and Economics Association.
Greg Woolf, the Leon Levy Director and Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Studies in the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU, will receive the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.
Woolf is regarded as one of the world’s most distinguished scholars of ancient history, whose research greatly impacted our understanding of the Roman world and life within ancient empires. His pioneering work integrated archaeological data into the study of provincial cultures, and it used climate science, evolutionary theory and social anthropology in the history of urbanism. His first book, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (1998), helped define the field of humanistic scholarship, addressing the history of cultural change in a province of the Roman empire. He is currently researching mobility and migration in the ancient world, and his latest book is entitled The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History.
Woolf currently serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Roman Archaeology and is a former editor of the Journal of Roman Studies. He is a fellow of the British Academy, of the Societies of Antiquaries of Scotland and of London, and a member of Academia Europea.
