The Harvard Law School Library staff invite you to attend a book talk and discussion in celebration of Recognizing Wrongs by John C.P. Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky (Harvard University Press, Feb. 4, 2020).
Tuesday, February 25, 2020, at noon, with lunch
Harvard Law School Milstein West A/B
1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA
No RSVP required
About Recognizing Wrongs
“Tort law is badly misunderstood. In the popular imagination, it is “Robin Hood” law. Law professors, meanwhile, mostly dismiss it as an archaic, inefficient way to compensate victims and incentivize safety precautions. In Recognizing Wrongs, John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky explain the distinctive and important role that tort law plays in our legal system: it defines injurious wrongs and provides victims with the power to respond to those wrongs civilly.
Tort law rests on a basic and powerful ideal: a person who has been mistreated by another in a manner that the law forbids is entitled to an avenue of civil recourse against the wrongdoer. Through tort law, government fulfills its political obligation to provide this law of wrongs and redress. In Recognizing Wrongs, Goldberg and Zipursky systematically explain how their “civil recourse” conception makes sense of tort doctrine and captures the ways in which the law of torts contributes to the maintenance of a just polity.
Recognizing Wrongs aims to unseat both the leading philosophical theory of tort law—corrective justice theory—and the approaches favored by the law-and-economics movement. It also sheds new light on central figures of American jurisprudence, including former Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Benjamin Cardozo. In the process, it addresses hotly contested contemporary issues in the law of damages, defamation, malpractice, mass torts, and products liability.” — Harvard University Press
The book talk discussion will include:
John C.P. Goldberg, Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence and Deputy Dean at Harvard Law School.
Benjamin Zipursky, Professor of Law at Fordham Law School.
Danielle Citron, Professor of Law at Boston University Law School.
Noah Feldman, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law and Director, Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law.
Frank I. Michelman is Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard University.
About John C.P. Goldberg
John C. P. Goldberg is Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence and Deputy Dean at Harvard Law School. An expert in tort law, tort theory, and political philosophy, Professor Goldberg joined the Law School faculty in 2008. From 1995 until then, he was a faculty member of Vanderbilt Law School, where he served as Associate Dean for Research (2006-08). He is co-author of a leading casebook — Tort Law: Responsibilities and Redress (4th ed. 2016), as well as The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Torts (2010). He has also published dozens of articles and essays in scholarly journals. Goldberg has taught a broad array of first-year and upper-level courses, and has received multiple teaching prizes. An Associate Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Fourth Restatement of Property, Goldberg also serves as an advisor to the Third Restatement of Torts. In addition, he is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Tort Law and Legal Theory, and in 2009 was Chair of the Torts and Compensation Systems Section of the Association of American Law Schools. After receiving his J.D. in 1991 from New York University School of Law, Goldberg clerked for Judge Jack Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York and for Supreme Court Justice Byron White. He earned his B.A. with high honors from the College of Social Studies, Wesleyan University. He also holds an M. Phil. in Politics from Oxford University and an M.A. in Politics from Princeton University. Before joining the Vanderbilt faculty, he briefly practiced law in Boston.
About Benjamin C. Zipursky
Benjamin C. Zipursky is Professor of Law at Fordham Law School, where he holds the James H. Quinn ’49 Chair in Legal Ethics and has twice served as Associate Dean (2001-03; 2010-13). He has taught as a Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School, Harvard Law School, and Vanderbilt Law School. Professor Zipursky is a leading scholar in torts, jurisprudence, and legal ethics, and has published more than sixty articles and chapters on subjects ranging from punitive damages and conflicts of interest in mass tort litigation to the varieties of pragmatism within legal philosophy. He has lectured extensively in the United States and abroad and is the co-author of a leading casebook, Torts: Responsibility and Redress (3d ed. 2012) (with John Goldberg & A. Sebok) and The Oxford Introduction to Law: Torts (2010) (with John Goldberg).