Economic Studies Director Robert Litan Named First Cabot Family Chair Holder

Brookings Economic Studies Director Robert Litan has been named first holder of the Cabot Family Chair. A former senior fellow at Brookings, Litan served in the Clinton administration as deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and as an associate director of the Office of Management and Budget. He returned to Brookings in May, 1996.

Litan’s expertise covers a wide range of economic and legal issues, including antitrust, banking, competitiveness, the Federal Reserve, savings and loans, liability issues, and trade policy. Formerly a partner with Powell, Goldstein, Frazer & Murphy, he was a visiting lecturer in banking law at Yale Law School, and a staff member of the Presidential-Congressional Commission on the Savings and Loan Crisis.

“We are very pleased that the Cabots’ generous gift will foster our continuing relationship with this prominent and innovative policy expert,” said Brookings President Michael H. Armacost.

Litan is currently co-authoring a book on trade policy and discourse. Titled Globaphobia, the volume will be jointly published early next year by Brookings, the Progressive Policy Institute, and the Twentieth Century Fund. Litan’s collaborators on the project—which also includes an ongoing series of panel discussions nationwide—are Robert Lawrence, of Brookings and Harvard University, Gary Burtless, of Brookings, and Robert Shapiro, of the Progressive Policy Institute. Litan is also co-authoring with William Niskanen of the Cato Institute Going Digital, a public policy primer for the digital age. Litan and Peter Swire, of the Ohio State University College of Law, recently issued None of Your Business, a draft study on the European privacy directive. The final study should be published in the spring of 1998. Litan has also written or co-written Financial Regulation in a Global Economy, Superfund, The Liability Maze, and many other books and papers.

The Cabot Family Chair, established in 1991, was the first endowed chair created at Brookings and was founded with a gift of $1.5 million by Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot, parents of then-Chairman of the Brookings Board of Trustees, Louis W. Cabot. Thomas Cabot, who turned the Cabot Corporation of Boston into a worldwide petrochemical manufacturer after World War II, also served as director of International Security Affairs in the Department of State under President Truman.