Michael Heller (law professor)

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This article is about the law professor. For the American poet, see Michael Heller.

Michael Heller is a law professor known for his focus on property law. Heller coined the term “Tragedy of the anticommons” while working as a law professor at Michigan Law School, in a 1998 paper entitled "The Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in the Transition from Marx to Markets” that was printed in the Harvard Law Review. He graduated from Harvard College and received his Law degree from the Stanford Law School. He worked as a summer associate at the Washington, DC white shoe law firm of Arnold & Porter LLP. Before attending Harvard, Heller graduated from the Quaker Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. Heller is currently Vice-Dean and Professor at Columbia Law School.

Heller has focused on private property laws and international property dilemmas, publishing such articles as "The Liberal Commons" (with Hanoch Dagan), in the Yale Law Journal in 2001 and "A Property Theory Perspective on Russian Enterprise Reform," in Assessing The Rule of Law in Transition Economies, also in 2001. His Tragedy of the Anticommons has sparked a debate among intellectual property theorists that continues to be discussed today.