Barak D. Richman

Barak Richman is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of Business Law and Co-Director of the Health Law Program at the George Washington University Law School and a Senior Scholar at the Clinical Excellence Research Center (CERC) at the Stanford University School of Medicine. For the twenty years prior to joining GW Law, he was on the faculty at Duke Law School and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, where he was a founding faculty member of the Duke Margolis Institute for Health Policy, a Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, and Duke Law School’s Teacher of the Year in 2010. He has had visiting appointments at Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford.

Professor Richman’s primary research interests include the economics of contracting, new institutional economics, antitrust, and healthcare policy. His many writings on the global diamond industry culminated in his book Stateless Commerce, published by Harvard University Press in 2017. He is an authority on antitrust and competition policy, serving as coauthor of the casebook Internet and Telecommunications Regulation, and in 2020 he was a member of the Working Group on Platform Scale at Stanford University’s Program on Democracy and the Internet that proposed middleware as a solution to stem the economic and political power of dominant internet platforms. Professor Richman’s scholarship on US healthcare financing and delivery has appeared in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Health Affairs and Law and Contemporary Problems and led to roles on national task forces organized by the Commonwealth Fund, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and the American Antitrust Institute. In 2025, he served as Special Counsel for Competition Policy in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of General Counsel.

Professor Richman has an AB, magna cum laude, from Brown University, a JD, magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School, and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied under Nobel Laureate in Economics Oliver Williamson. He served as a law clerk to Judge Bruce M. Selya of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and from 1994-1996 he handled international trade legislation as a staff member of the United States Senate Committee on Finance, then chaired by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.