Richard W. Wright

Professor Wright is recognized nationally and internationally for his combining theoretical and descriptive analyses of basic issues in domestic and comparative tort law, legal proof, legal philosophy, and law and economics. His work has resulted in significant changes in accepted doctrine and underlying theoretical analysis by the American Law Institute and by academics and courts in the USA and many other countries. His published work appears in several international collections of leading scholarship on tort law, legal philosophy, and law and economics. He is an elected life member of the American Law Institute and has been an active participant in its revision of the Restatement of the Law Third on Torts. He has served as chair of the Section on Torts and Compensation Systems of the Association of American Law Schools and is a member of the advisory boards of the Center for Justice and Democracy, Journal of Tort Law, Quaestio Facti, Revista de Direito da Responsabilidade, and the Torts, Product Liability and Insurance Law Journal of the Social Science Research Network. He is an Academic Fellow of the Pound Civil Justice Institute and an external partner of the Centre for Enterprise Liability at the University of Copenhagen. He currently serves as organizer and lead editor of the Common Core of European Private Law’s comparative study of Reasonable Conduct in Tort Law.

Professor Wright received his J.D. degree, summa cum laude, from Loyola University in Los Angeles, where he graduated first in his class and was editor-in-chief of the law review, and an LL.M. degree from Harvard University. Before entering the academy, he worked in the Solicitor's Office of the U.S. Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C., and as a legal adviser and project leader in the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress. Before joining the IIT Chicago-Kent faculty, he was a member of the faculty of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, where he received the Monrad G. Paulsen Award for outstanding contributions to legal education. He has been a visiting professor, fellow and/or lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, the Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Argentina, the University of Melbourne in Australia, the University of Palermo in Italy, the Universities of Gdańsk and Wrocław in Poland, Ivan Franko University in Ukraine, Sichuan University and the China University of Political Science and Law in China, and Brasenose College and the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford in England, where he co-taught seminars in the Bachelor of Civil Law graduate law program.