The LEC’s 50th Anniversary Celebration “Manne Madness Tournament” consisted of four double-elimination regional tournaments, each featuring lectures from eight distinct professors, for a total of thirty-two tournament competitors. The top two professors from each region advanced to the Elite Eight National Championship round held in Miami from December 8-13, 2024 at the Eden Roc Hotel.
The Elite Eight comprised a prestigious group of law and economics professors providing the highest caliber lectures to 159 federal and state judges. In a series of hard-fought pairings, and by vote of the judges, Professor M. Todd Henderson of the University of Chicago Law School took the $50,000 grand prize.
National Champion
M. Todd Henderson
Michael J. Marks Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School
M. Todd Henderson is the Michael J. Marks Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. His research interests include corporations, securities regulation, and law and economics. He has taught classes ranging from Banking Regulation to Torts to American Indian Law.
Professor Henderson received an engineering degree cum laude from Princeton University in 1993. He worked for several years designing and building dams in California before matriculating at the Law School. While at the Law School, Professor Henderson was an editor of the Law Review and captained the Law School’s all-University champion intramural football team. He graduated magna cum laude in 1998 and was elected to the Order of the Coif. Following law school, Professor Henderson served as clerk to the Hon. Dennis Jacobs of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He then practiced appellate litigation at Kirkland & Ellis in Washington, DC, and was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company in Boston where he specialized in counseling telecommunications and high-tech clients on business and regulatory strategy.
Second Place Winner
Catherine M. Sharkey
Segal Family Professor of Regulatory Law and Policy, New York University School of Law
Catherine Sharkey is one of the nation’s leading authorities on the economic loss rule, punitive damages, and federal preemption. She has published more than fifty law review articles, essays, reviews, and book chapters in the fields of torts, products liability, administrative law, remedies, and class actions.
Professor Sharkey is a Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) and a Principal Adviser on Administering by Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence in the Regulatory State, a project for the Office of Chairman. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute (ALI) and adviser for the Restatement Third of Torts: Liability for Economic Loss and Restatement Third of Torts: Remedies projects. In April, 2011, Professor Sharkey was named a Guggenheim Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She is a founding member of the World Tort Law Society, established in 2012, a past chair of the AALS Torts and Compensation Systems Section, and past editor-in-chief of the Sedona Working Group on Punitive Damages and Mass Litigation.
Professor Sharkey’s scholarship has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and numerous state and federal appellate and trial courts. Sharkey testified as a New York tort law expert on the economic loss rule in Deutsche Bank AG v. Sebastian Holdings Inc., High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division, Commercial Court, 09-83, [2013] EWHC 3463 (Comm). She is also an active participant at domestic and international workshops and conferences of torts, administrative law, and preemption scholars.
Professor Sharkey earned a bachelor’s degree in economics, summa cum laude, from Yale University. She was captain of Yale’s lacrosse team, a member of the U.S. national women’s lacrosse team, and named to the All-American Women’s Lacrosse team. A Rhodes Scholar, she received a master of science in economics for development, with distinction, from Oxford University (Magdalen College), and her JD from Yale Law School, where she was Executive Editor of the Yale Law Journal. She clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice David Souter of the US Supreme Court. She then worked as a Supreme Court and appellate litigation associate at Mayer Brown before joining the faculty of Columbia Law School. She became a Professor of Law at NYU in 2007.
FURTHER INFORMATION:
Click below to view information on the Tournament and the four regional rounds:
