Richard Epstein

Richard A. Epstein, a law professor and legal theorist, teaches at the University of Chicago Law School and is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is one of the leading legal scholars in the United States and a prominent libertarian author. Epstein's work on eminent domain brought him fame when Senator Joseph Biden held up a copy of Epstein's book Takings during the 1991 confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. ... Epstein also has challenged established wisdom on employment discrimination laws, arguing that government intervention in employment contracts is unnecessary and even undesirable.

Epstein (b. 1943) is one of today's most important legal thinkers for liberty. ... Epstein has written books which are having a significant influence among lawyers and are just beginning to get wider recognition. His first big book was Takings (1985), about the Fifth Amendment, which everybody knows says individuals can't be forced to testify against themselves. Most people had forgotten that the Fifth Amendment also says that when government takes private property, it must pay just compensation. ... The Supreme Court has taken a few tentative steps to apply Epstein's ideas.

Epstein is among the few authors who have described a comprehensive vision for a free society. He did it in two important books. The first, Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995), began by rebutting the conventional view that government must get bigger as society becomes more complex. ... Epstein went on to identify six legal principles which provide a legal framework for a free society. ... Principles for a Free Society: Reconciling Individual Liberty with the Common Good (1998) mounted a sturdy answer to all those intellectuals who claimed that laissez faire promotes greed, favors the rich and grinds under the poor and helpless.

If [Ayn] Rand were alive, Richard Epstein would be her favorite law professor. Epstein is the most brilliant and prolific legal thinker today. Thankfully, he's also libertarian. Simple Rules for a Complex World is perhaps his most generally accessible work, illustrating how the basic rules that spring from human nature are still the best today, and that regulations designed to account for the complexity of our modern world are often self-defeating. Such crisp insights rarely emanate from American academia, which makes Epstein's works a rare treasure.

Richard A. Epstein, the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at NYU Law School, is an expert on numerous areas of the law, including property, torts, land use, civil procedure, contract law, workers’ compensation, and Roman law. He is the author of Takings: Private Property and Eminent Domain, Mortal Peril: Our Inalienable Right to Health Care, Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism, and Simple Rules for a Complex World. He is also ... a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago where he was on the regular faculty from 1973 to 2010.

Research Team:
Working Group on Intellectual Property, Innovation, and Prosperity, Steering Committee
Property Rights, Freedom, and Prosperity Task Force, Member
Immigration Reform, Contributor ...
Richard A. Epstein, the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law, New York University Law School, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. In 2011, Epstein was a recipient of the Bradley Prize for outstanding achievement. In 2005, the College of William & Mary School of Law awarded him the Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize.

Richard A. Epstein is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Law and Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. ... He has taught courses in administrative law, antitrust law civil procedure, communications, constitutional law, contracts, corporations, criminal law, criminal procedure, employment discrimination law, environmental law, health law and policy, legal history, labor law, property, real estate development and finance, jurisprudence, labor law, land use planning, patents, individual, estate and corporate taxation, Roman law, torts, water law, and workers' compensation.

A devastating amicus curiae brief has been submitted by three Cato Institute legal scholars and University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein, a long-time critic of eminent domain whose book Takings was first published in 1985. In that brief, they demonstrate that the likelihood of any net benefit to New London is extremely small ... The Cato/Epstein brief hits the bull's eye in observing that eminent-domain cases like this one "result in a systematic unfairness to the individuals who are forced to sacrifice their property to some fuzzy vision of the public good."

In responding to Richard Epstein's "faulty case for intervention," economist David R. Henderson writes: "The simple fact is that when a government thousands of miles away decides to intervene, it must figure out which faction to support and has little assurance that it will support the right one. Indeed, it has little assurance that there is a right one ... whatever else libertarian non-interventionists believe, few of us have what Professor Epstein calls an 'illusion of certainty.' It is the exact opposite ... There are many "monsters to destroy," to use John Quincy Adams's famous phrase ..."

From various illuminating discussions of Professor Epstein, it seems evident that there are three contrasting theories of tort liability interwoven in our legal structure. ... In a brilliant analysis of causation in the law, Professor Epstein has demonstrated that his own theory of strict tort liability is intimately connected to a direct, strict, commonsense view of 'cause.' ... The result, as Epstein trenchantly points out, is to vitiate the concept of cause altogether and to set the courts free to decide cases arbitrarily and in accordance with their own views of social policy.

But the lawyers also were at work at their end of the project, and none more productive or insightful than the man who arrived across the Midway a year after I got to Chicago, Richard Epstein. No stranger to philosophy—his undergraduate major at Columbia, my own alma mater—Epstein was at the time developing his theory of strict liability in torts, which dovetailed nicely with the Lockean understanding of rights, even as it contrasted with his colleague Richard Posner's negligence approach to torts.

The bulletin on the Harvard University website reported Wednesday today the death at age 63 of Robert Nozick. The release goes on to write what everyone who knew Nozick would confirm. As teacher, friend, and colleague in no particular order, he was a restless intellectual capable of enlivening every discussion with a bewildering blitz of questions that always left you one step behind. ... Those of us who knew him will miss him. Everyone on all sides of the political spectrum will benefit, under a principle of justice in intellectual transmission, from his spirited intellectual legacy in the service of liberty.

I studied law in England. The great advantage of English law schools, at least in the 1960s, was that they left you alone. I didn't have teachers who told me what to think. The English system was to read a bunch of stuff and then talk to a tutor for an hour and then read another bunch of stuff and then talk again with the tutor for another hour. The only direction I got was being told to read the 19th-century judicial opinions. ... Trying to figure out what the optimal policy is with respect to the public sector is something which should always be regarded as a daunting task, verging on impossibility.