Leo Katz is the Frank Carano Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. His work focuses on criminal law and legal theory more generally. By connecting criminal law, moral philosophy and the theory of social choice, he tries to shed light on some of the most basic building block notions of the law—coercion, deception, consent, and the use and abuse of legal stratagems, among others.
Professor Katz is the author of several books: Bad Acts and Guilty Minds: Conundrums of the Criminal Law (University of Chicago, 1987); Ill-Gotten Gains: Evasion, Blackmail, Fraud and Kindred Puzzles of the Law (University of Chicago, 1996); and most recently Why the Law Is So Perverse (University of Chicago, 2011), which he researched with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Together with Stephen Morse and Michael Moore, he edited Foundations of the Criminal Law (Oxford, 1999).