Jane Stapleton

Fall Term 2012

William K. Jacobs, Jr. Visiting Professor of Law

Research Interests

• Tort Law and Theory
• Causation
• Products Liability
• Philosophical Foundations of the Common Law
• Comparative Law

Education

• University of New South Wales BSc (Hons 1) 1974
• Adelaide University Ph.D. 1977
• Australian National University LLB (Hons 1) 1981
• Oxford University DPhil 1984

Appointments

• Fellow in Law, Balliol College, Oxford, 1987-1997
• Research Professor, The Australian National University College of Law, 1997-
• Statutory Visiting Professor, Oxford University, 2000- (non-stipendiary)
• Visiting Professor of Comparative Private Law, European University Institute, 2001
• Ernest E. Smith Professor of Law, University of Texas School of Law, 2002-
• Visiting Professor, Columbia Law School, 2007
• Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professor in Legal Science, University of Cambridge, 2011-2012
• William K. Jacobs, Jr. Visiting Professor of Law, 2012

Additional Information

Visiting Professor Stapleton will teach a section of Torts, as well as the reading group Causes and Consequences in Private Law in the Fall 2012 term.

Biographical Statement

Jane Stapleton originally trained as a scientist but resigned from a post-doctoral position at the University of Cambridge to re-train as a lawyer, first at the Australian National University (winning the University Medal and Supreme Court Judges' Prize) and later at Oxford where she obtained a doctorate in the area of private law. For more than a decade she was Fellow in Law at Balliol College, Oxford (where she is now an Emeritus Fellow). In 1997 she returned to her native Australia to become a Research Professor at the Australian National University. She is also Ernest E. Smith Professor of Law at the University of Texas and a Statutory Visiting Professor at Oxford. In 2008 she received a third doctorate, the DCL from the University of Oxford. In 2011-12 she was Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professor of Legal Science, University of Cambridge. In the UK she is an Honorary Bencher of Gray's Inn, in the US she is a Council Member of the American Law Institute and in Australia she is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Academy of Law. She has accepted invitations to teach and lecture as a Visiting Professor in the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, the USA, New Zealand, Canada, Italy and Brazil. She has acted as a consultant in major commercial, pharmaceutical, medical and environmental litigation in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

Representative Publications

• Stapleton, Jane. "The Risk Architecture of the Third Restatement of Torts," 44 Wake Forest Law Review 1309 (2009).
  
• Stapleton, Jane. "Choosing what we mean by 'Causation' in the Law," 73 Missouri Law Review 433 (2008).
  
• Stapleton, Jane. "Benefits of Comparative Tort Reasoning: Lost in Translation," 1 Journal of Tort Law 1932 (2007).
  
• Stapleton, Jane. "Liability for Drugs in the U.S. and E.U.: Rhetoric and Reality," 26 Review of Litigation 991 (2007).
  
• Stapleton, Jane. "Evaluating Goldberg and Zipursky's Civil Recourse Theory," 75 Fordham Law Review 1529 (2006).