Richard Epstein

Richard Allen Epstein, born April 17, 1943, is an American legal scholar known for his writings on torts, contracts, property rights, law and economics, classical liberalism, and libertarianism. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University and director of its Classical Liberal Institute, a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute, the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a senior lecturer and James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Chicago. According to James W. Ely Jr., Epstein's writings have had a pervasive influence on American legal thought; a 2000 study in the Journal of Legal Studies identified him as the twelfth-most cited legal scholar of the twentieth century, a 2008 Legal Affairs poll named him one of the most influential modern legal thinkers, a study of legal publications from 2009 to 2013 found him the third-most frequently cited American legal scholar of that period behind only Cass Sunstein and Erwin Chemerinsky, and a 2021 examination by Fred R. Shapiro ranked him the fifth most-cited legal scholar of all time.