Ramsi Woodcock
Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs Associate Professor of Law
Secondary Appointment, Gatton College of Business & Economics
Ramsi Woodcock writes on law and economics from a wealth-distributive perspective, particularly in relation to antitrust law, which he teaches along with the law of contract and corporate law. He is best known for his 2018 Yale Law Journal article, “The Obsolescence of Advertising in the Information Age,” which argues that the availability of large amounts of free product information in online consumer reviews has rendered advertising’s information function obsolete, leaving advertising with an exclusively manipulative, and hence anticompetitive, function. But he has also written extensively on personalized and dynamic pricing in relation to the antitrust laws. In articles such as “Big Data, Price Discrimination, and Antitrust” and “Personalizing Prices to Redistribute Wealth in Antitrust and Public Utility Rate Regulation,” he argues that the emergence of data-driven pricing will force governments to engage in pervasive regulation of prices across the economy in order to head off attempts by firms to use the technology to increase their profits. He is also a leading proponent of the “inframarginalist” approach to law and economics, which seeks out opportunities to redistribute wealth without harming economic efficiency. In 2019, he received a $100,000 grant from Knight Foundation to develop this approach. He has presented his work at numerous academic gatherings, including the Yale/Stanford/Harvard Junior Faculty Forum and annual meetings of the American Law and Economics Association.
Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Kentucky, he was Assistant Professor of Legal Studies in the Department of Risk Management and Insurance in the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University, and held a secondary appointment in the College of Law at Georgia State University. Prior to becoming a scholar, he practiced antitrust and corporate law at a number of corporate law firms, including the Washington, DC office of WilmerHale and the New York office of Debevoise & Plimpton. He served as a law clerk to Judge Thomas Ambro of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and summa cum laude from Yale College with distinction in Philosophy.
Courses
- Law 930 Antitrust Law
- Law 851 Business Associations
- Law 882 Secured Transactions
- Law 802 Contracts II
Personalizing Prices to Redistribute Wealth in Antitrust and Public Utility Rate Regulation, 2022 Wisc. L. Rev. 1407 (2022).
The Hidden Rules of a Modest Antitrust, 105 Minn. L. Rev. 2095 (2021).
The Efficient Queue and the Case against Dynamic Pricing, 105 Iowa L. Rev. 1759 (2020).
The Antitrust Case for Consumer Primary in Corporate Governance, 10 UC Irvine L. Rev. 1395 (2020).
Personalized Pricing as Monopolization, 51 Conn. L. Rev. 311 (2019).
The Obsolescence of Advertising in the Information Age, 127 Yale L.J. 2270 (2018).
The Antitrust Duty to Charge Low Prices, 39 Cardozo L. Rev. 1741 (2018).
Big Data, Price Discrimination, and Antitrust, 68 Hastings L.J. 1371 (2017).
Innovation and Reverse Payments, 44 F.S.U. L. Rev. 773 (2017).
Uncertainty and Reverse Payments, 84 Tenn. L. Rev. 99 (2016).
Inconsistency in Antitrust, 68 U. Miami L. Rev. 105 (2013).