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 served as an Associate Dean in   several administrations (2001-03; 2010-13; 2024). A member of the Fordham faculty since 1995, he has taught as a visitor at Columbia, Harvard and Vanderbilt Law Schools. 

Prof. Zipursky is an internationally renowned legal scholar in torts, defamation and privacy, products liability, and jurisprudence.  He 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 and the boundaries of the duty of care in negligence law.  Zipursky’s 1998 article Rights, Wrongs, and Recourse in the Law of Torts introduced “civil recourse theory” into legal scholarship. Over the past 25 years,  Zipursky and collaborator Prof. John C.P. Goldberg of Harvard Law School have established civil recourse theory as one of the leading theoretical models of tort law in the English-speaking world.

Prof. Zipursky and Prof. Goldberg were awarded the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) William L. Prosser Award for contributions to tort scholarship in 2023.  The Hart-Dworkin Award in Legal Philosophy was awarded to Zipursky and. Goldberg by the AALS Jurisprudence section in 2024.  Zipursky and Goldberg 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, Zipursky was the second most cited torts professor in the United States, 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 and featured in several legal and policy-based podcasts. Since 2002, Prof. Zipursky has been a member of the American Law Institute, where he has served as an Adviser 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, the Restatement Fourth of Property, and Principles of the Law, Civil Liability for Artificial Intelligence.

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)