Kenneth S. Abraham | |
---|---|
Born | June 1946 (age 77) |
Nationality | American |
Education | Indiana University (AB) Yale Law School (JD) |
Employer | University of Virginia School of Law |
Known for | Torts, insurance law |
Title | David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law |
Kenneth S. Abraham (born 1946) is the Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law.
In 1967, Abraham graduated with a bachelor's degree from Indiana University, magna cum laude , where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Abraham then attended Yale Law School, where he studied under famed torts scholar and future judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Guido Calabresi, graduating with a J.D. in 1971.
After law school, Abraham worked in private practice in Hackensack, New Jersey, before teaching law at Case Western Reserve University School of Law and then at University of Maryland School of Law. He began teaching full-time at UVA Law in 1984. Abraham specializes in the law of torts and insurance, [1] including emerging fields of torts and insurance such as the liability of self-driving cars. [2]
Abraham is a life member of the American Law Institute, where he has served as an adviser on the Restatement of the Law of Liability Insurance and several iterations of the Restatement (Third) of Torts. [3]
Product liability is the area of law in which manufacturers, distributors, suppliers, retailers, and others who make products available to the public are held responsible for the injuries those products cause. Although the word "product" has broad connotations, product liability as an area of law is traditionally limited to products in the form of tangible personal property.
In law and insurance, a proximate cause is an event sufficiently related to an injury that the courts deem the event to be the cause of that injury. There are two types of causation in the law: cause-in-fact, and proximate cause. Cause-in-fact is determined by the "but for" test: But for the action, the result would not have happened. The action is a necessary condition, but may not be a sufficient condition, for the resulting injury. A few circumstances exist where the but-for test is ineffective. Since but-for causation is very easy to show, a second test is used to determine if an action is close enough to a harm in a "chain of events" to be legally valid. This test is called proximate cause. Proximate cause is a key principle of insurance and is concerned with how the loss or damage actually occurred. There are several competing theories of proximate cause. For an act to be deemed to cause a harm, both tests must be met; proximate cause is a legal limitation on cause-in-fact.
A tort is a civil wrong that causes a claimant to suffer loss or harm, resulting in legal liability for the person who commits the tortious act. Tort law can be contrasted with criminal law, which deals with criminal wrongs that are punishable by the state. While criminal law aims to punish individuals who commit crimes, tort law aims to compensate individuals who suffer harm as a result of the actions of others. Some wrongful acts, such as assault and battery, can result in both a civil lawsuit and a criminal prosecution in countries where the civil and criminal legal systems are separate. Tort law may also be contrasted with contract law, which provides civil remedies after breach of a duty that arises from a contract. Obligations in both tort and criminal law are more fundamental and are imposed regardless of whether the parties have a contract.
In criminal and civil law, strict liability is a standard of liability under which a person is legally responsible for the consequences flowing from an activity even in the absence of fault or criminal intent on the part of the defendant.
Guido Calabresi is an Italian-born American legal scholar who serves as a Senior circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He is a former Dean of Yale Law School, where he has been a professor since 1959. Calabresi is considered, along with Ronald Coase and Richard Posner, a founder of the field of law and economics.
In American jurisprudence, the Restatements of the Law are a set of treatises on legal subjects that seek to inform judges and lawyers about general principles of common law. There are now four series of Restatements, all published by the American Law Institute, an organization of judges, legal academics, and practitioners founded in 1923.
William Lloyd Prosser was the Dean of the School of Law at UC Berkeley from 1948 to 1961. Prosser authored several editions of Prosser on Torts, universally recognized as the leading work on the subject of tort law for a generation. It is still widely used today, now known as Prosser and Keeton on Torts, 5th edition. Furthermore, in the 1950s, Dean Prosser became Reporter for the Second Restatement of Torts.
In its broadest sense, no-fault insurance is any type of insurance contract under which the insured party is indemnified by their own insurance company for losses, regardless of the source of the cause of loss. In this sense, it is similar to first-party coverage. The term "no-fault" is most commonly used in the United States, Australia, and Canada when referring to state or provincial automobile insurance laws where a policyholder and their passengers are reimbursed by the policyholder's own insurance company without proof of fault, and are restricted in their right to seek recovery through the civil-justice system for losses caused by other parties. No-fault insurance has the goal of lowering premium costs by avoiding expensive litigation over the causes of the collision, while providing quick payments for injuries or loss of property.
Roger John Traynor was the 23rd Chief Justice of California (1964–1970) and an associate justice of the Supreme Court of California from 1940 to 1964. Previously, he had served as a Deputy Attorney General of California under Earl Warren, and an Acting Dean and Professor of UC Berkeley School of Law. He is widely considered to be one of the most creative and influential judges and legal scholars of his time.
Aaron D. Twerski is an American lawyer and professor. He is the Irwin and Jill Cohen Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, as well as a former Dean and professor of tort law at Hofstra University School of Law.
Tort reform consists of changes in the civil justice system in common law countries that aim to reduce the ability of plaintiffs to bring tort litigation or to reduce damages they can receive. Such changes are generally justified under the grounds that litigation is an inefficient means to compensate plaintiffs; that tort law permits frivolous or otherwise undesirable litigation to crowd the court system; or that the fear of litigation can serve to curtail innovation, raise the cost of consumer goods or insurance premiums for suppliers of services, and increase legal costs for businesses. Tort reform has primarily been prominent in common law jurisdictions, where criticism of judge-made rules regarding tort actions manifests in calls for statutory reform by the legislature.
Lance Liebman is an American law professor. He is the former Dean of Columbia Law School, and served as the Director of the American Law Institute from May 1999 to May 2014.
Ward Farnsworth is Professor of Law and holder of the W. Page Keeton Chair at the University of Texas School of Law, where he was Dean from 2012-2022. He served as Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law Third, Torts: Liability for Economic Harm, and is the author of books on law, rhetoric, philosophy, and chess.
Quasi-tort is a legal term that is sometimes used to describe unusual tort actions, on the basis of a legal doctrine that some legal duty exists which cannot be classified strictly as negligence in a personal duty resulting in a tort nor as a contractual duty resulting in a breach of contract, but rather some other kind of duty recognizable by the law. It has been used, for example, to describe a tort for strict liability arising out of product liability, although this is typically simply called a 'tort'.
Paul Schwartz is an expert in information privacy law. He is the Jefferson E. Peyser Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law and a director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. He is the former Anita and Stuart Subotnick Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, from 1998 to 2004.
Kyle D. Logue is an American law professor and the Douglas A. Kahn Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. He was appointed to serve as interim dean of the Law School effective January 1, 2024, until a permanent dean is appointed. From 2006-2016 he was the Wade H. and Dores M. McCree Collegiate Professor of Law. Logue is a leading scholar and teacher in the fields of insurance law, tax law, and torts. Logue uses insights from economics, psychology, and other disciplines to shed light on issues relating to the allocation, regulation, and fair distribution of risk in society. His recent research includes work on how private insurance contracts regulate individual and commercial behavior and on how public law regulates the behavior of insurance companies.
Harvey S. Perlman is a college administrator and the former chancellor of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In 2016, he returned to the Nebraska Law faculty after leading the institution for 16 years. During his tenure the University of Nebraska joined the Big Ten Conference, dramatically increased its research expenditures, and created a Nebraska Innovation Campus by moving the State Fair to Grand Island from its location adjacent to the University.
Kenneth Culp Davis was an American legal scholar remembered as "the father of administrative law." He was a professor of law at West Virginia University from 1935 to 1939, at the University of Texas at Austin from 1940 to 1948, at Harvard University from 1948 to 1950, at the University of Minnesota from 1950 to 1960, at the University of Chicago from 1961 to 1976, and at the University of San Diego from 1976 until his retirement in 1994.
Francis Hermann Bohlen was an American legal scholar from Pennsylvania who specialized in tort law and served as the Algernon Sydney Biddle professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Ariel Porat is the president of Tel Aviv University (TAU), a full professor and former dean at TAU's Buchmann Faculty of Law. Until his appointment as president, he was a distinguished visiting professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, incumbent of the Alain Poher Chair in Private Law at TAU, and recipient of The EMET Prize for Art, Science and Culture for Legal Research.