About Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

Tess Wilkinson-Ryan is a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard College, and her J.D. and Ph.D. (psychology) from the University of Pennsylvania. She grew up in southern Maine and now lives in Philadelphia with her husband, their two children, a dog, and a cat. 

Tess’s research is in the moral psychology of legal decision-making, especially in contracts and negotiations. Her work asks how people draw on their own commonsense moral intuitions to navigate complex financial and legal decisions. Her work covers a wide range of decision-making domains, from how people choose their retirement investments to when they default on their mortgages to whether they read the fine print on the back of their receipts. Her courses at Penn include Contract Law, Wills and Trusts, Consumer Law, Law and Psychology, and Ethical Leadership for Lawyers. She has published articles in numerous law journals and she has written for the Atlantic. Fool Proof is her first book.