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). A member of the Fordham faculty since 1995, he has taught as a visitor at Columbia, Harvard and  Vanderbilt Law Schools.  Prof. Zipursky is a leading scholar in torts, jurisprudence, and legal ethics, and has published more than one hundred articles and chapters on subjects ranging from products liability for pharmaceutical companies and conflicts of interest in mass tort litigation to the varieties of pragmatism within legal philosophy. In 2023, Prof. Zipursky and collaborator Prof. John C.P. Goldberg of Harvard Law School were awarded the Association of American Law Schools’ William L. Prosser Award for contributions to tort scholarship.  Goldberg and Zipursky were also awarded the 2023 National Civil Justice Award for their 2020 book Recognizing Wrongs, which was the subject of academic conferences on three continents. Zipursky is a co-author of a leading casebook, Tort Law: Responsibilities and Redress (5th ed. 2021) as well as The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Torts (2010).  On the most recent survey of law professor citations, he was the second most cited torts professor in the country, and he has frequently been interviewed by reporters from a variety of news media including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and the PBS Newshour.   Since 2002, Prof. Zipursky has been a member of the American Law Institute, where he has served as an Advisor of the Restatement Third of Torts: Intentional Torts to Persons, the Restatement Third of Torts: Miscellaneous Provisions, the Restatement Third of Torts: Medical Malpractice, the Restatement Third of Torts: Defamation and Privacy, and the Restatement Fourth of Property.

Representative Publications

A Precedent-Based Critique of Legal Positivism, Philosophical Foundations of Precedent, T. Endicott, H. Kristjansson, S. Lewis, eds. (OUP 2022) (with John C.P. Goldberg) 

Case-Linked Jurisdiction and Busybody States, 105 Minn. L. Rev. Headnotes (2020 Forthcoming)

Tort Theory, Private Attorneys General, and State Action: From Mass Torts to Texas S.B. 8 Journal of Tort Law (2022)

TORT LAW: RESPONSIBILITIES & REDRESS (Aspen 2021) (5th ed.)  (with J. Goldberg, L. Kendrick & A. Sebok)

RECOGNIZING WRONGS (Harvard University Press 2020) (with J. Goldberg)

RESEARCH HANDBOOK ON PRIVATE LAW THEORY (ed.) (Elgar 2020) (with H. Dagan)

Hohfeldian Analysis and the Separation of Rights and Powers, The Legacy of Wesley Hohfeld: Edited Major Works, Select Personal Papers, and Original Commentaries (Shyam Balganesh, Ted Sichelman & Henry Smith eds., Cambridge University Press, 2018 Forthcoming)

Ziglar v. Abbasi and the Decline of the Right to Redress, 86 Fordham L. Rev. 2167 (2018)

Access to Justice and the Legal Profession in an Era of Contracting Civil Liabilities 86 Fordham L. Rev. 2107 (2018)

The Monsanto Lecture: Online Defamation, Legal Concepts, and the Good Samaritan (2018), 51 Val. U. L Rev. 1

THE SUPREME COURT’S STEALTH RETURN TO THE COMMON LAW OF TORTS, (2016) (with John C.P. Goldberg)

The Strict Liability in Fault and the Fault in Strict Liability,  85 Fordham L. Rev. 743 (2016)

Reasonableness in and out of Negligence Law, 163 U. PA. L. REV. 2131 (2015)

The Fraud-on-the-Market Tort, 66 VAND. L. REV. 1755 (2013) (with J. Goldberg)

The Inner Morality of Private Law, 58 AM. J. OF JURIS. 27 (2013)

Civil Recourse Defended: A Reply to Posner, Calabresi, Rustad, Chamallas, and Robinette, 88 IND. L. REV. 569 (2013) (with J. Goldberg)

Palsgraf, Punitive Damages, and Preemption, 125 HARV. L. REV. 1757 (2012)

Consent v. Closure 96 CORNELL L. REV. 265 (2011) (with H. Erichson

The Easy Case for Products Liability: A Response to Polinsky & Shavell, 123 HARV. L. REV. 1919 (2010) (with J. Goldberg)

Integrity and the Incongruities of Justice: A Review of DANIEL MARKOVITS, A MODERN LEGAL ETHICS: ADVERSARY ADVOCACY IN A DEMOCRATIC AGE, 119 YALE L. J. 1948 (2010) Tort as Wrongs, 88 TEXAS L. REV. 917 (2010)(with J. Goldberg)

Tort as Wrongs, 88 TEXAS L. REV. 917 (2010)(with J. Goldberg)

Practical Perfectionism versus Practical Positivism: The Hart/Fuller Debate at Fifty, 83 N.Y.U. L. REV. 1170 (2008)

Sleight of Hand, 48 WM. & MARY L. REV. 1999 (2007)

A Theory of Punitive Damages, 84 TEX. L. REV. 105 (2005)

Civil Recourse, Not Corrective Justice, 91 GEORGETOWN L. J. 695 (2003)

Pragmatic Conceptualism, 6 LEGAL THEORY 457 (2000)

The Moral of MacPherson (with J. Goldberg), 146 U. PA. L. REV. 1733 (1998)

Rights, Wrongs, and Recourse in the Law of Torts, 51 VAND. L. REV. 1 (1998)