Lawrence J. McQuillan is director of Business and Economic Studies and senior fellow in political economy at the Pacific Research Institute (PRI) in San Francisco.  Human Events describes him as a “distinguished conservative leader” in public policy.

Since joining PRI in 2001, Dr. McQuillan has specialized in tax, budget, regulation, and lawsuit-reform issues.  He is coauthor of Jackpot Justice (cited in The Economist and Washington Post), Tort Law Tally, and the U.S. Tort Liability Index.  Because of this work, PRI is now one of the nation’s “leading organizational proponents of tort reform” (Journal of Empirical Legal Studies).  He is also coauthor of the U.S. Economic Freedom Index, published with Forbes, which ranks the 50 states according to how friendly or unfriendly their state-government policies are to free enterprise and consumer choice.

McQuillan speaks regularly to civic and policy groups across the country and to reporters around the world.  His television appearances include NBC news, FOX, CNBC, and CNN.  YouTube hosts some of his interviews.  He is a frequent guest on nationally syndicated radio talk shows hosted by Ron Insana, Jim Bohannon, Roger Hedgecock, Ronn Owens, and Lars Larson to name a few.  He advises lawmakers and advocacy groups around the world, provides legislative testimony, and was a member of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s task force on a constitutional spending limit for California.

McQuillan has more than 240 publications in such leading outlets as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Chicago Sun -Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Daily News, Weekly Standard, Forbes, USA Today, and Investor’s Business Daily.  He writes on such topics as lawsuit abuse, economic freedom, tax and spending limits, workers’ compensation, and medical liability reform.

McQuillan created the California Golden Fleece Awards, exposing fraud and abuse in California government.  Cited in The Nation and the Los Angeles Times, these awards led to the overhaul of the California Victim Compensation Program, helped reform California’s workers’ compensation system, and made PRI “one of the leading players” to end direct taxpayer funding of the U.C. Miguel Contreras Labor Program.

From 1998 until 2001, McQuillan was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, where he specialized in international economics.  He edited the book The International Monetary Fund—Financial Medic to the World? (translated into Japanese) and wrote the study The Case against the International Monetary Fund, which Nobel laureate Milton Friedman reviewed as “excellent.”

From 1993 until 1997, McQuillan was the founding publisher and contributing editor of Economic Issues, a national subscription newsletter based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which reviewed economic journal articles relevant to current public-policy issues.

While in graduate school at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he earned an MA and PhD in economics, McQuillan was a research assistant for Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan and received the H. B. Earhart Fellowship for research excellence.  Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, awarded him a BA in economics and business administration.