Michael Frakes is the A. Kenneth Pye Distinguished Professor of Law at Duke Law School. He holds a secondary faculty appointment in the Duke Economics Department and also serves as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Since the end of 2023, he has served as a Co-Editor-in-Chief of the American Law and Economics Review.
Frakes is generally interested in empirical research in the areas of health law, torts, and innovation policy. His research in health law and torts is largely focused on understanding how certain legal, financial, and social influences impact the decisions of physicians and other health care providers. This work also explores the resulting implications for patient health, with a particular emphasis on racial disparities in health outcomes. His research in innovation policy has predominantly centered on exploring the determinants of behaviors and outcomes at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, with a recent focus on the drug-patent landscape.
Frakes’ scholarship has appeared in (or is forthcoming in) leading economics, law, and medicine journals, including the American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, and JAMA.
He is currently serving as the Principal Investigator on two R01 awards from the NIH. The first explores the effects of immunizing physicians from medical liability on the extent and quality of the medical care they deliver. The second entails building (and analyzing) the first known database of all patents associated with FDA approved large-molecule drugs.
Frakes received his BS in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2001. Thereafter, he worked simultaneously toward his JD at Harvard, which he received cum laude in 2005, and his PhD in Economics at MIT, which he received in 2009. While working toward the completion of this concurrent degree track, he also spent just short of two years (from 2005 to 2007) as an associate in the Mergers and Acquisitions group at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Wilmington, Delaware. From 2009 to 2011, he was an academic fellow at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. Before arriving at Duke in 2016, he taught at Cornell Law School and the Northwestern University School of Law. He has also served as a Visiting Professor of Law at both Harvard Law School and the New York University School of Law.
