Center for Law & the Economy Workshop: Allison Tait (Richmond)

Center for Law and the Economy Workshop Series 

The Murphy Institute's Center for Law and the Economy hosts workshops each semester featuring Tulane and guest faculty from the fields of law, economics, and political science. Presenters share their latest research on a range of topics, including regulation, civil rights, the criminal legal system, and other key issues in law and political economy. Papers are distributed beforehand to the participants who read the paper and prepare discussion questions for the presenter.

The workshops, organized by Adam Feibelman, Director of the Center on Law and the Economy and Sumter D. Marks Professor of Law at Tulane Law School, are open to faculty, students, and the Tulane community. 

Allison Tait is professor of law at the University of Richmond where she teaches trusts and estates, family law, critical theory, feminist legal theory, and seminars about the "meaning of money" and family abolition. Professor Tait joined the University of Richmond Law faculty in 2015. Before coming to Richmond, she was an Associate-in-Law at Columbia Law School. She also clerked for the Hon. Richard Palmer of the Connecticut Supreme Court and spent a year as the Gender Equity Postdoctoral Fellow for the Yale Women Faculty Forum.

Professor Tait's research addresses the regulation of family and household economies and the ways in which the regulation of "family money" produces complex forms of inequality. Her research takes up questions of entitlement, privilege, and dispossession, and she writes about the ways that family wealth rules help to embed difference along the various axes of identity. She has written articles about the legal framework of high-wealth exceptionalism; the use of family trusts to safeguard social and cultural capital; and role of marriage in the creation of economic privilege.

She is currently working on a book, The House that Family Money Built (UC Press, 2026), that pairs analysis of poverty governance with wealth management. The book centers on the disparate ways in which the populations on the two ends of the wealth spectrum are treated, the ways in which they strangely resemble and reflect one another, and the ways in which they are connected through patterns of wealth extraction.