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."

"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. ... 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 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.' Causal proposition in a strict liability view of the law takes such form as, "A hit B,' 'A threatened B,' or 'A compelled B to hit C.'"

"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."

"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. ... Nozick was, as far as I know not trained as a lawyer ..., but his ceaseless curiosity and imagination allowed him to develop by intuition a theory of justice in holdings that followed closely on the legal approach to these problems."

"We know that in the old days of the Polish parliament, which required unanimous votes, they often got unanimity by taking the lone dissenter and throwing him out the window. On the other hand, rampant majoritarianism means that 51 percent can indeed confiscate the wealth of all 49 percent, which is what you get under the New Deal."