Professor Michael S. Knoll

Michael Knoll is the Theodore Warner Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, Professor of Real Estate at the Wharton School, and Co-director of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Tax Law and Policy.

An expert on the interface of business and law, especially tax law, Professor Knoll is the author of more than 60 articles. Professor Knoll’s academic work has been published in student law reviews, peer-reviewed economics journals, and professional journals.  His op-ed pieces have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.

Much of Professor Knoll’s research focuses on the economic incentives created by legal rules and how economics can be used to improve legal doctrine. For example, in a series of pieces on prejudgment interest, Professor Knoll developed a finance-based approach for courts to use to calculate prejudgment interest.  More recently, Professor Knoll’s research focuses on how taxation impacts competitiveness, especially within the United States and the European Union, and on how modern business transactions are structured.

Professor Knoll teaches courses in business and tax law to students in the Penn Carey Law School, the Wharton School, and to executives. He serves as the academic director for legal education programs and for the Carey JD/MBA Program at the University of Pennsylvania.  He is also an affiliate of the Zell/Lurie Real Estate Center at the Wharton School, of the Penn-Wharton Public Policy Initiative, and of the Penn Institute for Law and Economics.  In addition, Professor Knoll is the editor of Forensic Economic Abstracts, an electronic journal published by the Social Science Research Network.

Professor Knoll joined the Penn Carey Law School in 2000.  Before that, he was on the faculty of USC Law.  He has been a Visiting Professor at Boston University, Georgetown, Virginia, and Columbia.  Professor Knoll was also a John M. Olin Senior Research Scholar at Columbia, a John M. Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Toronto University, a John Raneri Research Fellow at the Australian School of Taxation and Business Law, University of New South Wales, and a visiting professor at ESADE Law School.

Before entering academia, Professor Knoll clerked for the Honorable Alex Kozinski, U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, served as legal advisor to two vice chairmen of the U.S. International Trade Commission, and practiced law.  

Professor Knoll’s undergraduate, graduate (A.M., Public Policy; Ph.D. Economics), and law degrees are all from the University of Chicago.  In 2013, Professor Knoll completed the Advanced Management Program at Wharton.