A leading expert on the application of economics to legal problems whose scholarship is focused on international economic relations, Alan O. Sykes is widely recognized as a creator of the relatively new academic discipline of international economic law—a convergence of a host of international legal issues and economics. His writing and teaching have encompassed international trade, torts, contracts, insurance, antitrust, international investment law and economic analysis of law. In 2010, he founded Stanford Law School’s LLM program in International Economic Law, Business and Policy (IELBP). Professor Sykes has been a member of the executive committee and the board of the American Law and Economics Association, and served as reporter for the American Law Institute Project on Principles of Trade Law: The World Trade Organization. He is associate editor of the Journal of International Economic Law, a member of the board of editors of the World Trade Review, and a member of the editorial board of the American Journal of International Law. He formerly served as an editor of the Journal of Legal Studies and the Journal of Law and Economics. He is a former National Science Foundation graduate fellow in the Department of Economics at Yale University.

Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty again in 2015 (he was on the faculty from 2005 – 2012), Professor Sykes was the Robert A. Kindler Professor of Law at NYU Law School and, prior to 2005, he was the Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, where he also served as faculty director of curriculum.