Adam Chilton Becomes 15th Dean of the University of Chicago Law School

After 11 years on the faculty, an empirical scholar steps up to lead what he calls “the best law school in the world.”

One might say it was fate that Adam Chilton found his way to the Law School more than a decade ago, when he was a JD and PhD student at Harvard considering his next move. Already a serious scholar, he had his sights set on academia. He had plans to head to DC, where his then girlfriend, now wife, Britt, had launched her own career as a lawyer. But UChicago beckoned.

“Many of the people who ended up being my most critical mentors at that time in my life were people who had UChicago connections,” recalled Chilton. In fact, it was one of those mentors who recognized that Chilton would thrive in a place like UChicago and encouraged him to apply to the Harry A. Bigelow Teaching Fellowship, a leading program for training future law professors.

Hesitant to derail his DC plans but curious, Chilton, a Phoenix, Arizona, native, took a flight to meet the minds of UChicago Law. The interview for the Bigelow Fellowship was “just a meeting,” he told himself. He had never lived in the Midwest and had only briefly passed through before.

“After I left that meeting, I called Britt and said: ‘We have to move to Chicago,’” recalled Chilton. “That experience made me strongly convinced that the Law School was the right place for me.”

Reflecting on that day, Chilton said it was the way in which the faculty members had dissected his ideas. He had shared his dissertation and “they were getting into the weeds of my paper in a very intense way. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced,” he said. “That sort of intensity and genuine curiosity was really appealing to me, and the more I learned about the Law School and the work being done there by its faculty, the more I wanted to be a part of that kind of community that cares deeply about thinking seriously about ideas.”

Chilton did not go to DC. He became a Bigelow Fellow in 2013 and one year later—rather unconventionally, since the Bigelow Fellowship is a two-year program—joined the faculty as an assistant professor. In 2017, he was named the Walter Mander Research Scholar, and in 2019, he became a full professor. In 2024, Chilton became the Howard G. Krane Professor of Law, and finally, in July 2025, he became dean of the Law School, as Thomas J. Miles, the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Law and Economics, stepped down and rejoined the full-time faculty after a decade of leadership.

Anthony J. Casey, ’02, the Donald M. Ephraim Professor of Law and Economics, who first met Chilton on a phone interview, recalled: “I knew immediately he was a Chicago person. It was clear from the way he was discussing his ideas and even giving me feedback on my own— that he was one of us.”