TortsProf Blog

Tort Law and Social Equality Speakers Series: Vicki Evans & Jodi Gardner

The next session of the Tort Law and Social Equality Project Speakers Series takes place virtually over Zoom on Friday, April 25 at the special time of 3:00-4:30 pm EST. Vicki Evans, Lecturer in Private Law at King's College, London, and Jodi Gardner, Brian Coote Chair of Private Law at the University of Auckland, will speak on the use of private nuisance claims to enforce building safety standards.

Vicki and Jodi will speak for about 45 minutes after which there will be a Q&A period. The Zoom link is copied here:  https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/83196201352

Harvard's Project on the Foundations of Private Law Seeks Fellow

The Project on the Foundations of Private Law at Harvard Law School is seeking applicants for full-time, one- to two-year residential appointments, starting in the fall of 2025. The Project on the Foundations of Private Law is an interdisciplinary research program at Harvard Law School dedicated to scholarly research in private law. Applicants should be aspiring academics with a primary interest in one or more of property, contracts, torts, intellectual property, commercial law, unjust enrichment, restitution, equity, and remedies. The Project seeks applicants with a serious interest in legal structures and institutions, and welcomes a variety of perspectives, including economics, history, philosophy, and comparative law.

 

Application materials are due to Susan Norton ([email protected]) by 9:00 a.m. on March 12, 2025. Details on both the fellowship and the application can be found at https://plproject.law.harvard.edu/academics/ under "Call for Postdoctoral Fellow Applications."

Harold Luntz (1937-2025)

The legal academy suffered a significant loss last week.  Harold Luntz, who was emeritus at Melbourne Law School, passed away at the age of 87.  Luntz was a champion of alternatives to tort law.  From the Melbourne website:

Harold Luntz is an Emeritus Professor in the Law School. Until his retirement at the end of 2002, he held the George Paton Chair of Law. Thereafter, he continued until 2008 to teach in the postgraduate program. From 1986 to 1988 he was Dean of the Faculty of Law. He was educated in South Africa and at Oxford University, before migrating to Australia in 1965.

Harold is:

• • the author of Assessment of Damages for Personal Injury and Death (4th edition, 2002);
  • and Assessment of Damages for Personal Injury and Death: General Principles (2006);
  • principal author of Torts: Cases and Commentary (7th edition, 2013); and
  • the author of numerous articles, notes and comments on the law of torts.

He was the General Editor of the Torts Law Journal (1993 - 2011).

In 2000 he was the inaugural recipient of the John G Fleming Memorial Award for Torts Scholarship and in 2003 was awarded the AILA Insurance Law Prize.

From 1967 to 1984, Harold was the secretary of the Victorian Chief Justice's Law Reform Committee. From time to time, he acted as consultant to other law reform agencies and government bodies. He also served from 1990 to 1992 as a part-time senior member of the Workcare Appeals Board in Victoria and from 1993 to 1998 as Deputy Chair of the Seafarers Rehabilitation and Compensation Authority.

George Priest (1947-2024)

Yale's George Priest has passed away at the age of 77.  Priest was a law-and-economics theorist whose work often intersected with tort law.  The Yale memorial notice (via Brian Leiter) is here.

Torts at the AALS Annual Meeting

From Elizabeth Weeks:

The Section Program,"Understanding the Third Restatement's Approach to Dignitary Harm," will be held on Wednesday, January 8, 9:50 am – 11:20 pm, Moscone Center, Level Two South, Room 209. Speakers include Rick Hasen, Caprice Roberts, Zahra Takhshid, and Mike Wells. The Program is co-sponsored by the Sections on Insurance Law and Defamation and Privacy. The Section Award Ceremony, honoring William L. Prosser Award Winner, Nora Freeman Engstrom, will be held on Thursday, January 9, 11:40 am - 12:30 pm, Moscone Center, Level Two South, Room 208.  Please join us in the same location, starting at 11 am for a light breakfast before the ceremony.  The event will include remarks by Jonathan Cardi, Michael Green, Robert Rabin, and Adam Zimmerman. Please continue to send nominations for new Executive Committee members. The Section business meeting will follow the Wednesday Program.

Nora Freeman Engstrom is the 2025 Prosser Award Honoree

Congratulations to Nora Freeman Engstrom, who has been named the 2025 Prosser Award honoree!  From the announcement at ALI:

The Association of American Law Schools’ (AALS) Section on Torts and Compensation has named Stanford Law School Professor Nora Freeman Engstrom the winner of the 2025 Prosser Award. Named in honor of William L. Prosser, author of the seminal treatise on tort law, the award recognizes lifetime contributions to scholarship, teaching and service in the field of tort law. Engstrom will receive the Prosser Award at the annual AALS meeting in January 2025.

Engstrom is believed to be the youngest winner of the Prosser Award since the award’s inception in 1974. Past honorees include Boston University School of Law Professor Fleming James, federal judge and former Yale Law School Dean Guido Calabresi, retired federal judge and renowned legal scholar Richard Posner, and SLS’s Robert L. Rabin, the A. Calder Mackay Professor of Law.

Engstrom is a nationally recognized expert in tort law and legal ethics and has played a leading role in clarifying, modernizing, and advancing tort law in the United States. She has authored numerous award-winning articles, is the author or co-author of three casebooks, including the classic tort law casebook Tort Law and Alternatives, and is the past Chair of the AALS Section on Torts and Compensation Systems.

Engstrom also co-directs SLS’s Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession, the premier academic Center in the United States devoted to making the civil justice system more equitable, accessible, and transparent.

Since 2019, she has served as a Reporter on two Restatement Third of Torts projects: the Miscellaneous Provisions project, as well as the Medical Malpractice project. In 2022, the ALI awarded Engstrom the R. Ammi Cutter Reporter’s Chair for her outstanding work as a Reporter.  

“The Prosser Award highlights the fundamental importance of tort law to our justice system and to the promotion of fairness and responsibility throughout society,” Engstrom said. “Tort law reinforces the principle that no one is above the law, and everyone has a right to their day in court.”  

Engstrom continued: “Winning the Prosser Award has special resonance for me because the roster of past recipients includes so many of my heroes, mentors, and friends. Even being mentioned in the same breath as such luminaries as Ken Abraham, Guido Calabresi, Mike Green, Richard Posner, Judge Jack Weinstein, and my mentor and dear friend, Bob Rabin, is thrilling and humbling. All are people I have long revered.”

Rabin, who received the Prosser Award in 2008, said Engstrom “truly fits the bill” for an award designed to honor a torts professor “who has contributed singularly distinguished service to the torts community.”

“From the beginning of her academic career, she has authored one illuminating article after another, ranging from the internal dynamics of the tort system in action to superb doctrinal studies of cutting-edge issues,” Rabin said. “All of this in combination with her outstanding teaching skills and distinctive, institutional work refining and refocusing the field of accident law. From a personal perspective, she is a gem to have as a colleague, co-author, and co-teacher.”

Mike Green of Washington University School of Law, winner of the Prosser Award in 2015 and a fellow Reporter with Engstrom on two current Torts Restatement projects said, “Nora has contributed monumentally to our understanding of tort law and compensation systems. She has subjected a variety of subjects to her deep research, keen analytical mind, and elegant writing. Her work on the Third Restatement of Torts will benefit courts, lawyers, and academics for decades to come. She is also a delightful colleague to work with and a hero to her students.”

Sebok on Twerski

Tony Sebok has posted to SSRN Aaron Twerski:  Practical Wisdom at Ground Zero.  The abstract provides:

This Article celebrates Professor Aaron Twerski's "practical wisdom" in crafting a solution (with Jim Henderson) to a problem faced by Judge Alvin Hellerstein in the 9/11 First Responder cases. The problem was that Congress did not include these plaintiffs within the Victims Compensation Fund ("VCF") despite there being every reason to suspect that the interaction of workers' compensation law and tort law, if left to operate on their own, would generate a politically unacceptable outcome. Despite his clear misgivings-expressed decades earlier-about allowing those who control the workplace to enjoy the benefits of limited liability guaranteed by workers' compensation while shifting the cost of their own carelessness onto third parties, Professor Twerski devised a settlement that, in effect, did exactly that. This Article explains how the settlement achieved a certain degree of justice by permitting prudence to prevail over principle.

Goldberg Appointed Interim Dean at Harvard Law

Congratulations to Harvard on its decision to appoint John Goldberg as interim dean of HLS.  An excellent choice.  

There is something of a trend of tort scholars being named deans in recent months.  In addition to John, we have Leslie Kendrick (UVa), Andy Klein (Wake Forest), and Cynthia Nance (Arkansas) [she's more labor and employment, but she has enough of a torts background that I think we can legitimately claim her].  Am I missing anyone?

University of St. Thomas (Minnesota) Seeks Torts Visitor

The University of St. Thomas (Minneapolis) School of Law invites applications for at least two Visiting Professor positions at any faculty rank for either the 2023 Fall semester, the 2024 Spring semester, or the full 2023-24 academic year. 

We have specific curricular needs for first year Torts and Lawyering Skills; we will consider candidates’ interest in teaching additional courses in light of our other needs.  Applicants will be expected to teach two classes during a semester visit, and either three or four classes during an academic year visit.

UST Law’s commitments to scholarship, teaching, service, and community are inspired by its mission, which dedicates it, as a Catholic law school, “to integrating faith and reason in the search for truth through a focus on morality and social justice.” We welcome applicants of diverse races, ethnicities, geographic origins, gender identities, ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, sexual orientations, religions, work experience, physical and intellectual abilities, and financial means.

UST Law has been recognized for excellence in various ways (see:https://www.stthomas.edu/law/about/rankings/):

• #23 faculty scholarly impact (Sisk/Leiter methodology)
• #1 in the nation for best practical training (National Jurist) 
• #8 for “quality of student life” (Princeton Review)
• #5 for state and local judicial clerkships (Princeton Review)

UST Law is located in the heart of downtown Minneapolis. The University of St. Thomas is the largest private university in Minnesota, with 10,000 undergraduate and graduate/professional students; eight colleges and professional schools (including schools of business, engineering, health, and others); and 55-plus graduate and professional degree programs.

QUALIFICATIONS

Candidates must have a J.D. from an accredited law school, distinguished academic or professional credentials, and a record of excellence in teaching.

To apply:Please submit a cover letter and C.V. online at http://www.stthomas.edu/jobs/.

You may contact Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Elizabeth Schiltz, at [email protected], with questions.

Review of applications will begin immediately and continue until the positions are filled.  

Harvard's Project on the Foundations of Private Law Seeks Fellow

The Project on the Foundations of Private Law at Harvard Law School is seeking applicants for full-time, one- to two-year residential appointments, starting in the fall of 2024. The Project on the Foundations of Private Law is an interdisciplinary research program at Harvard Law School dedicated to scholarly research in private law. Applicants should be aspiring academics with a primary interest in one or more of property, contracts, torts, intellectual property, commercial law, unjust enrichment, restitution, equity, and remedies. The Project seeks applicants with a serious interest in legal structures and institutions, and welcomes a variety of perspectives, including economics, history, philosophy, and comparative law.

Application materials are due to Bradford Conner (conner at law.harvard.edu) by 9:00 a.m. on March 5, 2024. Details on both the fellowship and the application can be found at https://plproject.law.harvard.edu/people/ under "Apply to be a Postdoctoral Fellow."

Marshall Shapo (1936-2023)

Marshall Shapo, a long-time faculty member at Northwestern and Prosser Award Honoree, passed away late last year.  Northwestern's notice is here.  (Via Brian Leiter's Law School Reports)

Tort Law and Social Equality Project Speakers Series: Martha Chamallas

The Tort Law & Social Equality project is having its 2024 Speakers Series. 

2024 Winter

---

Martha Chamallas

January 19, 2024, 12:00 p.m. EST

https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/88310780045

“Trauma Damages”

This paper examines the concept of trauma as it relates to tort recoveries, featuring three contemporary contexts: rape trauma, racial trauma, and birth trauma. It explains why many trauma victims are unable to qualify for a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis, even though they experience many symptoms of PTSD. It explores the obstacles to recovery for victims of chronic racism and obstetric violence and calls for a recommitment to the “eggshell plaintiff” rule and dismantling of artificial distinctions between physical and emotional harm to respond to the intensified injuries suffered by marginalized persons in underserved communities marked by violence, injustice, poverty and deprivation.

 Martha Chamallas is a Distinguished University Professor and the Robert J. Lynn Chair in Law Emerita at the Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University. She is the author of The Measure of Injury: Race, Gender and Tort Law (with Jennifer B. Wriggins) (NYU Press 2010), Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tort Opinions (with Lucinda M. Finley) (Cambridge U. Press 2020) and numerous articles exploring such topics as the devaluation of emotional harm, bias in the computation of damages and the underutilization of tort law for harms stemming from sexual discrimination and abuse.

Her most recent articles propose a negligence framework for redressing rape and articulate the contours of social justice tort theory. She is the 2022 winner of the William L. Prosser Award for her pioneering work on gender and race in tort law. She currently teaches torts at Fordham Law School.

From Zoë Sinel:

I am thrilled to announce the 2024 Tort Law and Social Equality Project Speakers Series. Our inaugural speaker will be Distinguished University Professor Martha Chamallas from Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University. She will deliver her talk, "Trauma Damages," on Friday, January 19 at noon over Zoom. 

 

This series will feature monthly presentations from scholars around the world who work on topics situated at the intersection of torts and social justice. Its aim is to foster debate and dialogue within the academic community focused on these topics and cultivate social justice tort theory as a distinctive field of inquiry. A full list of presenters can be found on the Tort Law and Social Equality website (see link below).

 

Presentations will be hosted virtually by the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and are open to the public. They will last about 45 minutes and will be followed by a 45-minute Q&A period. Sessions will be recorded and made available for subsequent online viewing. Attendees are not expected to pre-read.

Ken Abraham is the 2024 Prosser Award Honoree

Congratulations to Ken Abraham!  The Executive Committee of the AALS Torts & Compensation Systems Section has just announced that he is the 2024 Prosser Award honoree.  From the UVa Law website:

Kenneth Abraham is one of the nation’s leading scholars and teachers in the fields of torts and insurance law. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a life member of the American Law Institute. For 20 years he served on the Council of the ALI — the board of lawyers, judges and academics that governs the Institute. He is also an adviser to the ALI’s Restatement of Torts (Third) and was the senior advisor to the Restatement of the Law of Liability Insurance. He has served on a number of other boards and commissions concerned with tort law and insurance reform.

Abraham is a recipient of the All-University of Virginia Outstanding Teacher Award, the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Certificate from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia for "outstanding achievement in teaching, research and public service,” and the American Bar Association's Robert B. McKay Law Professor Award, given for "outstanding contributions to tort and insurance law." He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and Case Western Reserve Law School. He was the first law professor to be elected an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Coverage Counsel.

Abraham is the author of more than 70 law review articles and six books. His first book, "Distributing Risk: Insurance, Legal Theory, and Public Policy" (1986), brought modern legal theory to the study of insurance law. His torts treatise, "The Forms and Functions of Tort Law" (6th ed. 2022), has become a basic text for first-year law students across the country. And his casebook, "Insurance Law and Regulation" (7th ed. 2020) has been used as the principal text in courses on insurance law in more than 100 American law schools.

Abraham has been a consulting counsel and an expert witness in a variety of major insurance coverage cases, involving commercial general liability, directors and officers liability, environmental cleanup liability, toxic tort and products liability, and property insurance claims. He has also served as an arbitrator for the Dalkon Shield Claimants Trust, resolving over 100 claims by women seeking damages for injuries caused by the Dalkon Shield intrauterine device, both in the United States and Europe.

Tortsprof Don Gifford Named Distinguished University Professor at Maryland

Don Gifford, deservedly, has been named Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland.  From the announcement:

“He is, quite simply, a truly leading scholar in the [torts] field recognized as such both in America and internationally," wrote Judge Guido Calabresi, Sterling Professor Emeritus and former dean of Yale Law School and senior judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in his letter in support of the nomination. “But every bit as important as his magnificent reputation is the quality of his scholarship. I find myself, again and again, going to what Don has written and edited in my own scholarship and my judicial opinions. And to be blunt, there are mighty few academics of whom I can say that...”  

As dean of the law school from 1992 through 1999, Gifford initiated the efforts to build the current law school building, obtained the legislative approval and funding for the building, raised a majority of the private contributions for it, and saw the building project through its initial architectural design phases. Under his leadership, the level of private giving to the law school quadrupled.

Douglas Laycock Retires from Teaching at UVa

Douglas Laycock, an expert in religious liberty and remedies, is retiring from teaching at UVa.  He is better known to torts profs as a Reporter for the Restatement (Third) of Torts:  Remedies.  The ALI website has the story.

St. Thomas (MN) Needs Visitor in Torts

The University of St. Thomas (Minneapolis) School of Law invites applications for at least two Visiting Professor positions at any faculty rank for either the 2023 Fall semester, the 2024 Spring semester, or the full 2023-24 academic year. 

We have specific curricular needs for first year Torts and Lawyering Skills; we will consider candidates’ interest in teaching additional courses in light of our other needs.  Applicants will be expected to teach two classes during a semester visit, and either three or four classes during an academic year visit.

UST Law’s commitments to scholarship, teaching, service, and community are inspired by its mission, which dedicates it, as a Catholic law school, “to integrating faith and reason in the search for truth through a focus on morality and social justice.” We welcome applicants of diverse races, ethnicities, geographic origins, gender identities, ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, sexual orientations, religions, work experience, physical and intellectual abilities, and financial means.

UST Law has been recognized for excellence in various ways  (see:https://www.stthomas.edu/law/about/rankings/):

1. #23 faculty scholarly impact (Sisk/Leiter methodology)
2. #1 in the nation for best practical training (National Jurist) 
3. #8 for “quality of student life” (Princeton Review)
4. #5 for state and local judicial clerkships (Princeton Review)

UST Law is located in the heart of downtown Minneapolis. The University of St. Thomas is the largest private university in Minnesota, with 10,000 undergraduate and graduate/professional students; eight colleges and professional schools (including schools of business, engineering, health, and others); and 55-plus graduate and professional degree programs.

Please submit a cover letter and CV online at http://www.stthomas.edu/jobs/, or contact Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Lisa Schiltz, at [email protected]. Review of application materials will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled. 

Outside In: The Oral History of Guido Calabresi

Norman Silber has published Outside In:  The Oral History of Guido Calabresi with Oxford University Press.  The blurb provides:

Guido Calabresi is an extraordinary person. His family, of Jewish heritage, occupied a secure and centuries-old position near the top of Italian society-- until the rise of fascism. Guido's parents fled to America on the eve of the war in Europe, with their children, to avoid political and religious persecution. They arrived without money or social standing. Guido's talents and good fortune helped him to thrive at several elite American institutions and to become a leading legal scholar, teacher, law school dean, and judge. He would receive prizes and awards for his contributions; to legal theory, especially for opening up the area of 'law and economics'; for contributions to the modern transformation of American law schools, as the Dean of Yale Law School; and for advancing the development of law including through progressive decisions as a member of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Outside In is a unique sort of account, written in Guido's remarkable voice based on recordings that which took place over a decade. The book is a unique amalgam of oral history and biography, with supplementary commentaries to explain, elaborate, validate, and interpret and situate the personal narrative within its larger historical context.

Updated:  The author was kind enough to provide a code for 30% off:  ALAUTHC4 

National Civil Justice Institute Announces Civil Justice Scholarship Award Winners

Torts profs are heavily represented.  From the letter by NCJI President, Christopher Nace:

The Officers and Trustees of the National Civil Justice Institute are proud to bestow the Institute’s 2023 Civil Justice Scholarship Award to Professor John C. P. Goldberg (Harvard Law School), Professor Benjamin Zipursky (Fordham Law School), and Professor Diego A. Zambrano (Stanford Law School).

It is our distinct privilege to honor Professor Goldberg and Professor Zipursky for their book, Recognizing Wrongs (Harvard University Press, 2020), in which they explain how their “civil recourse” concept makes sense of tort doctrine and captures the ways in which the law of torts contributes to the maintenance of a just polity. 

We are also privileged to honor Professor Zambrano for his article, Federal Expansion and the Decay of State Courts, 86 U. Chi. L. Rev. 2101 (2019), in which he explores how federal expansion may be contributing to the decay of state courts and has reinforced a plaintiff-defendant divergence between the two systems.

Finally, the Institute also recognizes with High Distinction Professor Jonathan Cardi (Wake Forest University School of Law), Professor Valerie Hans (Cornell Law School), and Professor Gregory Parks (Wake Forest University School of Law) for their article, Do Black Injuries Matter?: Implicit Bias and Jury Decision Making in Tort Cases, 93 So. Cal. L. Rev. 507 (2020). After conducting one of the first comprehensive experimental examinations of how race affects judgments on personal injuries, the authors found that the dollar awards for the injuries suffered by black plaintiffs in hypothetical cases were lower than awards for the same injuries experienced by white plaintiffs.

More details are at https://ncji.org/civil-justice-scholarship-award/.  Contact NCJI’s Executive Director, Mary Collishaw, at [email protected] or 202-944-2841 with any questions.

We are very proud to recognize this important legal scholarship, and the academics responsible.

AALS Torts Section: Call for Nominations to the Executive Board

Current Chair Tim Lytton posts:

If you would like to nominate yourself or another person as a candidate for a position on the Executive Board of the section, please send an email to current Chair Timothy Lytton at [email protected] by January 3, 2023. Elections for the new executive board will take place at the section business meeting immediately following the section session at the AALS on January 5.  I had a fantastic experience on the Executive Committee and recommend it highly.

Cyndi Nance to Receive Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award

Cyndi Nance, Dean of the University of Arkansas School of Law, will receive the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award from the AALS Section on Women in Legal Education.  The ceremony is at the Annual Meeting on Friday, January 6 from noon until one.  More details here.  Dean Nance's specialty is labor and employment law, but she regularly teaches Torts, so we can claim her!