Richard A. Epstein
Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow
Member, Property Rights, Freedom, and Prosperity Task Force

Expertise: Constitutional law, communications law, employment law, health law and policy, property rights, intellectual property, tort law

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Richard A. Epstein, the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and, as of 2007, a visiting professor of law at NYU Law School.

In 2003 he was awarded an honorary degree in law from Ghent University. In 2005 he was named by Legal Affairs magazine as one of the twenty leading legal thinkers in the United States. Also in 2005, the College of William & Mary School of Law awarded him the Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize.

Epstein is known for his research and writing in a broad range of constitutional, economic, historical, and philosophical subjects. Among the subjects he has taught at the University of Chicago are communications law, constitutional law, contracts, corporation criminal law, employment discrimination law, health law, jurisprudence, labor law, patents, property, torts, Roman law, real estate development and finance, and individual and corporate taxation.

He edited the Journal of Legal Studies (1981–91) and the Journal of Law and Economics (1991–2001). He is now a director of its Olin Program in Law and Economics. He served as interim dean of the University of Chicago Law School in the spring of 2001. He is a general columnist for the National Law Journal and writes for the Tech Forum on FT.com.

Epstein's books include How the Progressives Rewrote the Constitution (2006); Free Markets under Siege: Cartels, Politics and Social Welfare (Hoover Institution Press, 2005), Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism (2003); Principles for a Free Society: Reconciling Individual Liberty with the Common Good (1998); Mortal Peril: Our Inalienable Right to Health Care? (1997); Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995); Bargaining with the State (1993); Forbidden Grounds: The Case against Employment Discrimination Laws (1992); and Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain (1985). Epstein is also the editor of Cases and Materials in the Law of Torts (8th ed. 2004) and has written a one-volume treatise, Torts (1999).

He received a B.A. degree in philosophy summa cum laude from Columbia in 1964. He received a B.A. degree in law with first-class honors from Oxford University in 1966 and an LL.B. degree, cum laude, from the Yale Law School in 1968. Upon his graduation he joined the faculty at the University of Southern California, where he taught until 1972. In 1972, he visited the University of Chicago and became a regular member of the faculty the following year. He was named James Parker Hall Professor in 1982 and Distinguished Service Professor in 1988.

He spent the 1977–78 year as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He has been a senior fellow at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics since 1984 and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985. He has been a Hoover fellow since 2000.