Photo: Kat Walsh / CC BY-SA 3.0 (source: Wikimedia Commons)
My Take
What draws me to Richard Allen Epstein is his sheer intellectual stubbornness, in the best sense. Born in New York in 1943, Columbia-educated, he has spent a career insisting that property rights and classical liberalism deserve a rigorous defense rather than a fashionable dismissal. I admire scholars who refuse to drift with the academic tide, and Epstein clearly built his reputation on argued conviction rather than consensus. His fluency across torts, contracts, and law-and-economics signals a mind that connects fields most people keep apart. Even if his views provoke, that provocation is the point. A genuinely consequential thinker worth wrestling with.
Overview
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 the director of the Classical Liberal Institute.
Summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1. Profile
- Name (English)
- Richard Allen Epstein
- Name (Japanese)
- リチャード・エプステイン
- Reading
- りちゃーど・えぷすていん
- Born
- April 17, 1943 (age 83)
- Zodiac / Chinese zodiac
- Aries / Goat
- Origin
- New York City, New York, United States
- Blood type
- Private
- Height
- Private
- Agency
- Private
- Occupation
- lawyer / jurist / editor / university teacher
2. Background
- Elementary school
- Private
- Junior high
- Private
- High school
- John L. Miller Great Neck North High School
- University
- Columbia University
Awards & achievements
- Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
3. Relationships
- Spouse
- Private
- Children
- Private
- Parents
- Private
- Siblings
- Private
4. Personality
Motto
Private
6. Links
Lawyer — see all → · Jurist — see all → · More people from United States →
7. About this entry
Tags
- Last updated
- 2026-06-02
Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public items are marked "Private / Unknown". English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.