TortsProf Blog

AALS Torts Section Call for Newsletter Items and Prosser Award Nominations

 Dear Colleagues,

We hope this email finds you well. We are writing as the Secretary and Treasurer of the AALS Torts & Compensation Systems section to pass along two important notices.

1.  Torts and Compensation Systems Section Newsletter

As most of you know, our section publishes a newsletter each fall listing: (1) symposia related to tort law; (2) recent law review articles on tort law; (3) selected articles from Commonwealth countries on tort law; and (4) books relating to tort law. If you know of any works that should be included, please forward relevant citations and other information to mjdavis@uky.edu. The deadline for inclusion in this fall's newsletter is Friday, August 16, 2019.

2.  2020 William L. Prosser Award

This is the first call for nominations for the 2020 William L. Prosser Award. The award recognizes “outstanding contributions of law teachers in scholarship, teaching and service” in torts and compensation systems. Recent recipients include Ken Simons, Marshall Shapo, Steve Sugarman, Aaron Twerski, Mike Green, James Henderson, Jane Stapleton, Guido Calabresi, Robert Rabin, Richard Posner, Oscar Gray, and Dan Dobbs. Past recipients include scholars such as Leon Green, Wex Malone, and John Wade.

Any law professor is eligible to nominate another law professor for the award. Nominators can renew past nominations by resubmitting materials. Living tort scholars and those who have passed away within the last five years are eligible for the award. Selection of the recipient will be made by members of the Executive Committee of the Torts & Compensation Systems section, based on the recommendation of a special selection committee. The award will be presented at the annual AALS meeting in Washington, D.C. in January 2020.   

Nominations must be accompanied by a brief supporting statement and should be submitted no later than Friday, July 19, 2019. Please email submissions to tlytton@gsu.edu.

Warm Regards,

Mary Davis and Tim Lytton

William C. Powers, Jr. (1946-2019)

I am sad to announce the passing of Bill Powers, former president of the University of Texas, dean of the Texas School of Law, and Reporter for the Restatement (Third) of Torts.  I did not know Bill well, but I was impressed with him in every encounter we had.  He was kind to me.  Brian Leiter has a post here, and UT has a memorial notice here.

Texas Torts Professor David Robertson Passes Away

David W. Robertson, the William Powers, Jr. and Kim L. Heilbrun Chair in Tort Law at the University of Texas School of Law, passed away at the end of 2018.  The University's announcement is here.  Thanks to blog founder, Bill Childs, for the information.

Torts Section Presents William Prosser Award to Ken Simons

From Chair Stacey Tovino's Twitter page.  Congratulations, Ken!

Stapleton Gives Fleming Lecture at Berkeley

Jane Stapleton, the Master of Christ's College at Cambridge University, delivered the 2018 John G. Fleming Lecture at Berkeley Law last week.  The University's announcement is here.  Congratulations to Jane!

2018 Torts Section Newsletter

Scott Hershovitz has released the 2018 AALS Torts Section newsletter:   Download AALS Tort Section Newsletter November 2018

Ken Simons is the 2019 William L. Prosser Award Recipient

The AALS Torts & Compensation Systems Section has announced that the 2019 William L. Prosser Award is bestowed upon Kenneth Simons.  Congratulations to Ken!  From the UC Irvine announcement:

IRVINE, Calif. (Sept. 4, 2018) - The University of California, Irvine School of Law is pleased to announce that Chancellor’s Professor of Law Kenneth Simons, a leading scholar at the intersection of torts, criminal law, and philosophy, was named the recipient of the 2019 William L. Prosser Award by the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Torts and Compensation Systems.

 

The Prosser Award recognizes “outstanding contributions of law teachers in scholarship, teaching and service” related to tort law and compensation systems. Prof. Simons will receive the award at the AALS Annual Meeting in January 2019.

 

“Ken Simons is well-deserving of this tremendous recognition,” said UCI Law Dean L. Song Richardson. “He is one of the most important scholars in the Torts field, a remarkable teacher and mentor to our students, and a well-respected, beloved colleague.”

 

Prof. Simons has published influential scholarship concerning assumption of risk and contributory negligence; the nature and role of mental states in criminal, tort and constitutional law; and negligence as a moral and legal concept. He has also explored such topics as bias crimes, corrective justice, the logic of egalitarian norms, mistake and impossibility in criminal law, and strict criminal liability. Others frequently engage with his work, which is cited often in one of the leading tort treatises, Dobbs’ Law of Torts. He is a frequent speaker and commentator at scholarly conferences on torts, criminal law, philosophy and related issues.

 

Co-Director of UCI’s Center for Legal Philosophy, Prof. Simons has also served, since 2012, as Co-Reporter and (since 2014) Chief Reporter for the Restatement Third of Torts: Intentional Torts to Persons. He has co-authored numerous lengthy Restatement drafts and presented them to different groups of the American Law Institute (ALI), the country’s leading independent organization made up of elected judges, academics, and practitioners, which publishes works to clarify and improve the law. The drafts clarify the tort doctrines of battery, assault, false imprisonment, consent, and defenses such as defense of property and self-defense.

 

Prof. Simons is also a dedicated and extraordinary teacher. His courses have included Common Law Analysis: Torts, Statutory Analysis: Criminal Law, Philosophy of Punishment, Law and Ethics of War, Constitutional Law and Products Liability.

 

“Prof. Simons obviously cares about both the subject matter of his classes and our learning the material,” said Rina Liles, UCI Law 2L student. “It's easy to be star struck by Prof. Simons’ professional stature, especially when our class discussions mirror conferences about the next Restatement. He has the brilliance to distill a complicated subject into terms his students understand, and do so with a great deal of warmth and humor.”

 

Additionally, the UCI Law faculty value his collegiality and judgment, as evidenced by his leadership role in directing the UCI Law Strategic Planning Committee.

 

Before joining UCI Law, Prof. Simons was Professor of Law and The Honorable Frank R. Kenison Distinguished Scholar in Law at Boston University School of Law. He was Associate Dean for Research and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs there.

 

Prof. Simons was a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and to Judge James L. Oakes, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Prof. Simons also worked as an associate at Goodwin, Procter & Hoar in Boston, in the field of civil litigation, including commercial law, tort, contracts, and prisoners’ rights. He received his J.D. from Michigan Law School, magna cum laude, and graduated from Yale University, summa cum laude, with a B.A. in philosophy.

Green to Receive 2018 McKay Award

Wake Forest's Mike Green is the recipient of the 2018 Robert B. McKay Law Professor Award, presented by the ABA's Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Section.  Wake Forest's announcement is here.  Congratulations to Mike!

Stein Appointed to Israeli Supreme Court

Alex Stein, who teaches torts and evidence courses at Brooklyn, has been appointed to the Israeli Supreme Court.  The news release is here.

Allen Linden (1934-2017)

Allen Linden has passed away at the age of 83.  A former Justice of Canada's Federal Court of Appeal, he was named Officer of the Order of Canada in 2015.  Moreover, he was a distinguished torts professor who continued to teach the subject during his judicial duties.  Linden studied with William Prosser at Berkeley, and became one of Canada's most-respected torts professors, teaching primarily at Osgoode Hall Law School.  In the 1960s, he authored a study on compensation for automobile accidents which led to the adoption of a no-fault plan in Ontario in 1969.  I never had the honor of meeting him, but I have heard numerous friends speak of him in glowing terms.  Rest in peace.  An obituary is here.

Northwestern's Shapo to Receive 2018 Prosser Award

The AALS Section on Torts and Compensation Systems is pleased to announce that the recipient of the 2018 William L. Prosser Award is Marshall S. Shapo, the Frederic P. Vose Professor of Law at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

The Prosser Award recognizes outstanding contributions in scholarship, teaching and service related to tort law. Nominations are made by fellow tort scholars, and the recipient is selected by the two most-recent Prosser Award winners and the immediate past Chair of the AALS Torts Section, with approval of the Torts Section Executive Committee. Professor Shapo's award, and his many contributions to tort law, will be recognized at the Torts Section meeting at the AALS Annual Meeting in San Diego, at 1:30 pm on Friday, January 5th, 2018.

AALS Torts Section Mentoring Program

The AALS Torts & Compensation Systems Section announces its new mentoring program.  The Torts Section may be able to help if you are a professor who:

• is starting a career in torts or shifting to torts from another subject area, and
• lacks a torts colleague to discuss scholarship and teaching.

The Executive Committee and the Section at large have numerous professors happy to work with you.  The goal is to match mentors and mentees based on specific areas of interest.  To start the process, please contact the Chair of the Torts Section, currently Chris Robinette (cjrobinette@widener.edu or 717-541-3993).

AALS Torts Section Chairs 1980-Present

It has been an honor to serve on the AALS Torts & Compensation Systems Section's Executive Committee since January 2012.  I rotated into the Chair position last Friday.  I enjoy history, and began to think about the history of the Section.  The Section was created around 1973; prior to that, AALS organized in "roundtables," which I take to have been less permanent entities.  The AALS has a list of all Section chairs since 1980, which I reproduce below.  The term is now one year, but it appears a two-year term was used during the mid-1990s.  If anyone has further information about the Section's history and would like to share it, please comment on the blog (comments are not immediate) or email me. 

Dominick Vetri	University of Oregon School of Law	1/1/1980
Frederick Davis		1/1/1981
Thomas C. Cady	West Virginia University College of Law	1/1/1982
Jean C. Love	Santa Clara University School of Law	1/1/1983
Harvey S. Perlman	University of Nebraska College of Law	1/1/1984
James A. Henderson, Jr.	Cornell Law School	1/1/1986
Jean C. Love	Santa Clara University School of Law	1/1/1987
David G. Owen	University of South Carolina School of Law	1/1/1988
Walter Probert	University of Florida Fredric G. Levin College of Law	1/1/1989
Lucinda M. Finley	University at Buffalo School of Law, The State University of New York	1/1/1990
Aaron D. Twerski	Brooklyn Law School	1/1/1991
Oscar S. Gray	University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law	1/1/1992
Diane C. Maleson	Temple University, James E. Beasley School of Law	1/1/1993
Jennifer H. Arlen	New York University School of Law	1/1/1995
Richard W. Wright	Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology	1/1/1997
Mark F. Grady	University of California, Los Angeles School of Law	1/1/1999
Catharine Wells	Boston College Law School	1/1/2000
Stephen G. Gilles	Quinnipiac University School of Law	1/1/2001
Keith Norman Hylton	Boston University School of Law	1/1/2002
Anita Bernstein	Brooklyn Law School	1/1/2003
Kenneth W. Simons	University of California, Irvine School of Law	1/1/2004
Peter A. Bell	Syracuse University College of Law	1/1/2005
Richard L. Cupp, Jr.	Pepperdine University School of Law	1/1/2006
James R. Hackney, Jr.	Northeastern University School of Law	1/1/2007
Ellen Michelle Bublick	The University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law	1/1/2008
John C.P. Goldberg	Harvard Law School	1/1/2009
Catherine M. Sharkey	New York University School of Law	1/10/2010
Michael L. Rustad	Suffolk University Law School	1/8/2011
John Valery White	University of Nevada, Las Vegas, William S. Boyd School of Law	1/8/2012
Jennifer Wriggins	University of Maine School of Law	2/14/2013
Andrew R. Klein	Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law	2/14/2014
Anthony J. Sebok	Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law	2/14/2015
Leslie Kendrick	University of Virginia School of Law	2/14/2016

 

Gregory Keating Has Been Busy

Greg Keating has uploaded to SSRN to SSRN 6 p apers:

Comment on Gardner:  Duty and Right in Public Law

Liability without Regard to Fault:  A Comment on Goldberg & Zipursky

Comment on Avraham and Yuracko:  Torts and the Paradox of Conservative Justice

Must the Hand Formula Not Be Named?

Is Cost-Benefit Analysis the Only Game in Town?

Products Liability as Enterprise Liability

Gifford Named Jacob A. France Professor of Torts at Maryland

Don Gifford was named the Jacob A. France Professor of Torts at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law on October 27, 2016. The title had been held by Oscar Gray until his retirement, and Oscar remains the Jacob A. France Professor of Torts Emeritus. Don delivered a lecture entitled "The Stubborn Survival of the Steam-Locomotive Compensation System in the Century of Driverless Cars." He argued that changes in technology and the impact of technological changes on the economy were the most important determinants of change in tort law. He then explored why there was so little change in the fundamental substantive principles of tort law during the twentieth century and why the tort system had generally prevailed over attempts to enact alternative compensation systems. 

October 18, 1926

...is the day Oscar Gray was born.  He celebrated his 90th birthday in Baltimore yesterday at a reception put on by his colleagues at the University of Maryland and the publishers of his treatise, Wolters Kluwer.  Happy birthday!

Lester Brickman Retires from Cardozo

Lester Brickman, who has written in mass torts and contingent fee reform, is retiring from Cardozo, where he was a founding member of the faculty.  Cardozo's website has an announcement here.

(Via Olson/Overlawyered)

Fleming Award in Torts Bestowed Upon Lewis Klar

University of Alberta Professor Lewis N. Klar is the 2016 recipient of the prestigious John G. Fleming Award in Torts, according to an announcement yesterday by UC Berkeley Law School. A giant in the world of Canadian tort law, Klar will deliver the fourth Fleming Lecture at Berkeley Law on Wednesday October 26, 2016 at 11:20 a.m. in room 105 of the law school. 

John Fleming was the 20^th century’s leading scholar of comparative tort law, as perhaps befitting someone who was born in Germany, educated in England, served as a law dean in Australia and spent the bulk of his illustrious career at Berkeley.  Professor Fleming’s treatise on The Law of Torts, drawing on the common law of a wide range of countries, is currently in its 10^th edition.  Fleming served for many years as the editor-in-chief of the Berkeley-based American Journal of Comparative Law.

Upon Professor Fleming’s death in 1997, the Fleming prize was created in his honor to be awarded bi-annually to an international scholar in tort law.  Professor Klar is the 10^th winner of the prize.  Previous recipients include law professors Harold Luntz of Melbourne, Guido Calebresi of Yale, Stephen Todd of New Zealand’s UC Law, Basil Markesinis of Univ. College London, Robert Rabin of Stanford, Mike Green of Wake Forest Univ., Bill Powers of Texas, Helmut Koziol of Univ. of Vienna and Judge Allen Linden of Canada.  Linden will travel to Berkeley to present the Prize to Professor Klar.

More recently, owing to the generosity of the Fleming family and Joe and Cathy Feldman of Chicago, Berkeley Law created the Fleming Lecture, to be delivered by the Fleming Prize winner. Professor Klar’s lecture is titled “The Ebbs and Flows of Tort Law: Reflections on a Half Century of Tort Law.” The Fleming Lecture is open to the public. 

Professor Klar served as Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta from 1997 to 2002. He was admitted to the Bar of the Province of Quebec in 1971 and the Law Society of Alberta in 2000. He was awarded a Queen’s Counsel in 2002, and received the Distinguished Service Award for his contribution to legal scholarship from the Law Society of Alberta and the Canadian Bar Association (Alberta) in 2005. In 2007, Professor Klar received the J. Gordin Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research from the University of Alberta. This is the university’s most senior and prestigious research award. In 2008, Professor Klar received the Hon. Tevie H. Miller Teaching Excellence Award from the Faculty of Law.

Professor Klar is the author of Tort Law, 5th edition, 2012, and a co-author of Canadian Tort Law: Cases, Notes & Materials, 14^th edition, 2014. In recognition of Professor Klar’s contributions to tort law, a Special Edition of the Alberta Law Review has just been published in his honour. Professor Klar was a contributor to the 10^th edition of Fleming’s The Law of Torts (2011) as well as to Torts Tomorrow: A Tribute to John Fleming (1998). Professor Klar is an elected member of the American Law Institute. His works have been cited hundreds of times by the courts in every province in Canada, including the Supreme Court of Canada.

Ralph Brill Retires from Chicago-Kent

From Richard Wright:​

 

In a recent post to the Tortprof discussion list, my long-time colleague, Ralph Brill, announced the imminent closing of that discussion group, which he initiated and managed for many years, due to his pending retirement and the few postings on that list in recent years. I (and others) attempted to post responses regarding both the list and Ralph's accomplishments during his almost 60 years of teaching. However, the list was closed down immediately, so ​(I believe) ​neither my posting or any other posting went through. I appreciate being able to make this post on the Tortsprof blog to acknowledge Ralph's lifetime work and to suggest an alternative, much more active list for those previously enrolled in the Tortprof list.

  

Ralph's retirement from Chicago-Kent at the end of this academic year after almost 60 years of teaching Torts (and other courses) deserves widespread acknowledgement. However, it unfortunately is likely to be little noted, at least among Torts scholars, since Ralph has always devoted his efforts more practically to actual cases (for which he has filed many persuasive briefs) and, especially, teaching and dissemination of information to students and faculty where he works and worldwide. He is rightfully regarded among Legal Writing and Research professors as the leading innovator and champion of work in that area, having created long ago Chicago-Kent's three-year Legal Writing and Research program staffed by full-time faculty, which has since been copied in part or whole by almost all other law schools. His creation and management of the Tortprof discussion list is only a small indication of his efforts to facilitate dissemination of information to relevant audiences. We at Chicago-Kent receive several emails from Ralph every day with information about relevant developments in legal academia.

 

I have a personal debt to acknowledge. When I joined Chicago-Kent 30 years ago, Ralph likely was not one of my biggest supporters, given my more theoretical bent, although I have always insisted on theory being based on or at least taking into account actual practice, Yet he immediately welcomed me and took me under his wing. From the beginning of my time at Chicago-Kent, he has been my closest associate, professionally and personally. He has been my go-to person for any question about tort liability, in addition to providing me and other Torts professors at Chicago-Kent with information about recent cases and other developments. He has also been a role model for me in speaking up, however unpopular the view might be among the faculty generally, for actions that benefit our students rather than we faculty members.

 

I will greatly miss having Ralph always around at Chicago-Kent, but I hope to continue to benefit from his friendship and advice.

 

The Tortprof discussion list is gone.  As Ralph noted in his final post, this will not be a major loss, given the minimal use of Tortprof. For those of you who have not already done so, I encourage you to join the Obligations Discussion Group (obligations@uwo.ca), which is much more active and international, which discusses private law more generally but mostly Tort law. ​ Its members mainly are from the English Commonwealth, but it includes a substantial number of scholars from the USA and a small but growing number from civil law jurisdictions. To subscribe to the list, send an email to Professor Jason Neyers (jneyers@uwo.ca) and include information about your academic or professional legal affiliation.​

Sugarman Wins Prosser Award

The AALS Section on Torts and Compensation Systems is pleased to announce that the recipient of the 2017 William L. Prosser Award is Stephen Sugarman, Roger J. Traynor Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

The Prosser Award recognizes outstanding contributions in scholarship, teaching and service related to tort law. Nominations are made by fellow tort scholars, and the recipient is selected by former Prosser Award winners and former chairs of the AALS Torts Section, with approval of the Torts Section Executive Committee. Professor Sugarman’s award, and his many contributions to tort law, will be recognized at the Torts Section meeting at the AALS Annual Meeting in San Francisco, at 1:30 pm on Friday, January 6th, 2017.