The door to Randal C. "Randy" Picker's office at the University of Chicago Law School was usually open, an invitation to bring him a new case, a hard institutional problem or an unfinished idea. Picker, a legal scholar who helped bring game theory into law and economics and spent more than 35 years teaching and serving the university, died on August 15, 2026, according to the University of Chicago Law School.

That open door fit the work. Picker studied systems that forced people, firms and governments to anticipate one another: bankruptcy, secured credit, competition, copyright, digital platforms and the rules that let institutions function. His career moved from private law to the computer industry, but the question underneath remained remarkably steady. He wanted to understand how rules shape choices, and how carefully designed institutions can make difficult choices possible.

Picker named that work in a 2008 Law School convocation address. He described lawyers as builders of institutions, whether they were helping create legislation, closing a transaction or setting a new regime in motion through contracts. The address linked the computer simulations he had studied as a scholar to the practical craft of law. Institutions could be examined for the pressures they survived, the failures that exposed their weaknesses and the rules that allowed people to act together.

Chicago was not simply Picker's employer. It was the setting for his entire adult education and nearly all of his academic career. He earned an economics degree from the College in 1980, a master's degree in economics in 1982 and a law degree with honors in 1985. As a law student he worked as an associate editor of the University of Chicago Law Review and entered the Order of the Coif. The university's faculty profile listed the same three Chicago degrees and the faculty appointment that followed in 1989.

Between student and professor, Picker clerked for Judge Richard A. Posner on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He then practiced at Sidley & Austin in Chicago, working on debt restructuring and corporate reorganizations. Those years gave him a practitioner's view of bankruptcy before he returned to Hyde Park, where he eventually became the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law and served as associate dean from 1994 to 1996.

His 1994 book Game Theory and the Law, written with Douglas G. Baird and Robert H. Gertner, translated strategic interaction and information economics into a form legal scholars could use to examine contracts, torts and financial distress. The work did more than add a mathematical vocabulary to legal analysis. It asked what each participant knows, what each can credibly promise and how a rule changes the next move. Picker applied that style of reasoning across an unusually broad scholarly range.

He also carried scholarship into the machinery of law. As a uniform-law commissioner, Picker helped with the 2001 overhaul of Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code, the framework governing secured interests in personal property. During his service as vice chair of the National Bankruptcy Conference, Congress adopted reforms the organization had recommended for small-business bankruptcy. Baird regarded Picker's municipal-bankruptcy work with Michael McConnell as the field's canonical treatment.

Technology gave Picker another large system to study. He wrote about competition and regulation in network industries, copyright's response to new tools, the Microsoft era and the power of digital platforms. At his death, he was preparing The Quest for Next: A Competitive History of the Computer Industry, a book examining how law and antitrust affected the development of computers and chips. PYMNTS noted that his commentary had also reached Competition Policy International's readers, carrying his analysis beyond the classroom and law reviews.

Picker treated teaching as another institution to test and improve. His courses ranged from antitrust and network industries to copyright, secured transactions and bankruptcy. In 2015 he became the first professor at the Law School to offer a massive open online course. Internet Giants: The Law and Economics of Media Platforms reached thousands of learners around the world. He prepared by spending dozens of hours on camera and taking a filmmaking course, evidence of the same willingness to become a beginner that he brought to improvisational theater at The Second City.

Students and colleagues described the result as rigor without distance. M. Todd Henderson credited Picker with inspiring his own academic career after watching him patiently unpack a complicated issue at an alumni lecture. Former dean Thomas J. Miles recalled Picker's regular presence at workshops and faculty lunches and that open office door, where new legal developments became shared problems rather than private conclusions. Picker's improv work, including a public group he organized with University colleagues, made listening and flexibility into another kind of study.

His university service was just as consequential. Picker chaired the committee behind the 2017 report on disruptive conduct and freedom of expression that became known as the Picker Report. He served the University Senate, Laboratory Schools, Library Board, dean searches and the presidential search that led to Paul Alivisatos's appointment. In the summer of 2026, he became vice provost for academic affairs, taking responsibility for faculty governance, appointments and promotion.

Picker's work persists in the strategic questions posed by Game Theory and the Law, the commercial rules he helped revise, the Picker Report's institutional framework and the technology history he was still writing. It also persists in classrooms shaped by his experiments and in the scholars who learned from an office where the door stayed open and a difficult question was always welcome.