Henry N. Butler is the Allison and Dorothy Rouse Dean, a George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law, and the executive director of the Law & Economics Center at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. For over thirty years, he has developed and led educational programs that teach the basics of economics, finance, accounting, statistics, and the scientific method to federal and state judges, as well as other legal professionals and scholars.

From 2007 to 2010, Butler served as the first executive director of the Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth at Northwestern University School of Law. He has held prior appointments at the Brookings Institution, Chapman University, the University of Kansas, the University of Chicago, and Texas A&M University. From 1986 to 1993, he was a law professor at George Mason and, during that period, also served as an associate dean and director of the Law & Economics Center. He returned to George Mason in 2010 and became dean in 2015.

Butler received an MA and PhD in economics from Virginia Tech (where James M. Buchanan was a member of his dissertation committee) and a JD from the University of Miami School of Law, where he was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law & Economics at the Law & Economics Center (directed by Henry G. Manne). He received his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Richmond.

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