Erick J. Sam

Erick J. Sam is a legal scholar who works on fundamental issues in tax law and policy, law-and-philosophy, and law-and-economics. He teaches in the areas of tax and contracts. He is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law, as well as an affiliated scholar with the Law and Philosophy Program at Columbia Law School.

 

Erick was previously a fellow at the NYU School of Law and visiting scholar at NYU Department of Philosophy. He received his PhD in Philosophy from Duke University, his JD from Yale Law School, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude in Philosophy and in Economics from Brown University. After law school, he practiced as a tax attorney in the New York office of the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. 

 

In his current and recent research, he (1) explores economic, philosophical, and legal relationships between inequality and market failure and draws on these connections to forge an alternative constitutional basis for a wealth tax; (2) devises the optimal institutional approach to distribution policy given epistemic limitations on economic and social science; and (3) develops some of the key legal, normative, and institutional dimensions of a theory of global tax justice.

 

In his leisure, Erick enjoys composing and performing classical, jazz, and other instrumental guitar music and playing chess. His musical influences include Heitor Villa-Lobos, Leo Brouwer, Django Reinhardt, John Fahey, Erik Satie, and Claude Debussy.