Ramsi Woodcock writes on law and economics from a wealth-distributive perspective, particularly in relation to antitrust law, which he teaches along with the law of contract and corporate law. He is best known for his 2018 Yale Law Journal article, “The Obsolescence of Advertising in the Information Age,” which argues that the availability of large amounts of free product information in online consumer reviews has rendered advertising’s information function obsolete, leaving advertising with an exclusively manipulative, and hence anticompetitive, function. But he has also written extensively on personalized and dynamic pricing in relation to the antitrust laws. In articles such as “Big Data, Price Discrimination, and Antitrust” and “Personalizing Prices to Redistribute Wealth in Antitrust and Public Utility Rate Regulation,” he argues that the emergence of data-driven pricing will force governments to leverage this technology to engage in pervasive regulation of prices across the economy in order to prevent firms from using the technology to engage in politically-unacceptable levels of redistribution away from consumers. He is also a leading proponent of the “inframarginalist” approach to law and economics, which seeks out opportunities to redistribute wealth without harming economic efficiency. In 2019, he received a $100,000 grant from Knight Foundation to develop this approach. He has presented his work at numerous academic gatherings, including the Yale/Stanford/Harvard Junior Faculty Forum and annual meetings of the American Law and Economics Association.

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Kentucky, he was Assistant Professor of Legal Studies in the Department of Risk Management and Insurance in the J. Mack Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University, and held a secondary appointment in the College of Law at Georgia State University. Prior to becoming a scholar, he practiced antitrust and corporate law at a number of corporate law firms, including the Washington, DC office of WilmerHale and the New York office of Debevoise & Plimpton. He served as a law clerk to Judge Thomas Ambro of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.