25 Facts About Richard Epstein

Richard Allen Epstein was born on April 17,1943 and is an American legal scholar known for his writings on torts, contracts, property rights, law and economics, classical liberalism, and libertarianism.

Richard Epstein is the Laurence A Tisch Professor of Law at New York University and the director of the Classical Liberal Institute.

Richard Epstein serves as a Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute, as the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and as a senior lecturer and the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Chicago.

Richard Epstein was born on April 17,1943, in Brooklyn, New York.

Richard Epstein's grandparents were Ashkenazi Jews who immigrated to the United States from Russia and Austria in the early 20th century.

Richard Epstein attended Columbia University as an undergraduate in the early 1960s.

Richard Epstein had wide-ranging academic interests and did not wish to select a single major, obtaining special permission from the university to pursue a self-selected program of study across sociology, philosophy, and mathematics.

Richard Epstein taught at USC for four years before moving to the University of Chicago Law School in 1972.

Richard Epstein taught at Chicago for 38 years, eventually holding the title of James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law.

Richard Epstein remains a professor emeritus and senior lecturer at Chicago, occasionally teaching courses there.

Since 2001, Richard Epstein has served as the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a prominent American public policy think tank at Stanford University.

Richard Epstein has served in many academic and public organizations and has received a number of awards.

Richard Epstein was editor of the Journal of Legal Studies from 1981 to 1991, and of the Journal of Law and Economics from 1991 to 2001.

Richard Epstein became famous in the American legal community in 1985 with Harvard University Press's publication of his book Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain.

At the height of the HIV pandemic in 1988, Richard Epstein argued that companies ought to be able to discriminate against "AIDS carriers" and that anti-discrimination laws were unfair to employers.

In 2014, Richard Epstein argued against reparations for African Americans in a piece published on the Hoover Institution's website.

In March and April 2020, Richard Epstein wrote several essays published by the Hoover Institution giving a contrarian account of the COVID-19 pandemic and warning against extensive containment and mitigative United States responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, which he called an "overreaction".

Richard Epstein's essays, containing a number of factual errors and misconceptions about the SARS-CoV-2 virus, circulated in conservative circles and in the Trump administration upon their publication.

Richard Epstein has said that when voting, he chooses "anyone but the Big Two" who are "just two members of the same statist party fighting over whose friends will get favors".

Richard Epstein says he is "certainly a Calvin Coolidge fan; he made some mistakes, but he was a small-government guy".

Richard Epstein has said that Learned Hand should have been on the Supreme Court and that his favorite English judge was Baron Bramwell.

In 2023, Richard Epstein co-authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal defending the 2023 Israeli judicial reform.

Richard Epstein has defended Israel's policies vis-a-vis Palestinians, calling allegations of apartheid a canard.

In January 2025, Richard Epstein argued against birthright citizenship in the United States, a right enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Richard Epstein is a first cousin of the comedian and actor Paul Reiser.