University Distinguished Professor Richard W. Wright named a Pound Institute Academic Fellow

University Distinguished Professor Richard W. Wright has been selected as an academic fellow of the Pound Civil Justice Institute. A member of the Chicago-Kent College of Law faculty since 1985, Wright is a leading advocate for just tort liability provisions.

"I am honored to be asked to contribute to the work of the Pound Civil Justice Institute as an academic fellow,” says Wright. “The institute is one of the very few entities dedicated to promoting research on and dissemination of objective information on tort liability in its substantive and procedural aspects."

The Pound Institute is a national legal think tank created by pioneering members of the trial bar and dedicated to ensuring access to justice for ordinary citizens. Through its activities, the Pound Institute works to give lawyers, judges, legal educators, and the public a balanced view of the issues affecting the United States civil justice system.

The Pound Institute’s invitation letter cited Wright’s recent paper, “Allocating Liability Among Multiple Responsible Causes: Principles, Rhetoric, and Power,” a chapter in Apportionment in Private Law (Kit Barker & Ross Grantham, eds., Hart Publishing 2019), and his overall body of work relating to the civil justice system, including an amicus brief relied upon by the U.S. Supreme Court in a unanimous decision upholding the joint and several (full) liability of multiple tortfeasors in cases employing federal law.

Wright’s teaching and research focus on domestic and comparative tort law, jurisprudence, law and economics, and law and artificial intelligence. His published work appears in several international collections of leading scholarship on tort law and legal philosophy. He has been a visiting professor, fellow, or lecturer at numerous foreign universities.

As an elected life member of the American Law Institute, Wright has been an active participant in the ALI’s revision of the Restatement of the Law Third of Torts and Restatement of the Law Fourth of Property. He is a member of the boards of advisors for the Journal of Tort Law, the Center for Justice and Democracy, and the Torts, Product Liability and Insurance Law Journal of the Social Science Research Network and is an external partner of the Centre for Enterprise Liability at the University of Copenhagen.