Faculty Profiles
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Patrick Hanlon
Title: Lecturer in Residence
Office: 685 Simon Hall
Tel: 510-642-1870
Email Address: phanlon@law.berkeley.edu
FSU Contact: Joanna M. Hooste
Patrick Hanlon is has joined the Boalt faculty after 30 years of private practice. He has extensive experience in complex litigation and class actions, with a special emphasis on toxic tort, environmental, and product liability litigation. He also has had extensive involvement in the legislative process both in connection with mass tort liability and as counsel to public interest advocacy organizations seeking to protect the civil liberties of immigrants and others who come into contact with the Department of Homeland Security.
Hanlon's research focuses on the place of civil liability in society's structures for regulating behavior that may adversely affect health, safety, and environmental and for compensating the casualties of such behavior. His interests include the operation of the U.S. civil justice system and alternative forms of compensation for mass injuries, comparison of U.S. and foreign compensatory regimes, representative and group litigation in the United States and abroad, the structure and functioning of the legal profession, and the U.S. legislative process. He is currently studying patterns of compensation for asbestos disease in the United States, Europe, Australia-New Zealand, and India.
Hanlon graduated in 1976 from the Harvard Law School, where he was article editor of the Harvard Law Review. He clerked for then Chief Judge Irving R. Kaufman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and in 1977 joined Shea & Gardner, a Washington D.C. law firm, which merged with Goodwin Procter in 2004. Hanlon resigned from Goodwin Procter in 2008.
Hanlon has frequently spoken at conferences in the United States and Europe on mass tort litigation and legal ethics, and has been invited to speak at the Stanford University Interdisciplinary Seminar on Conflict and Dispute Resolution (2004), the University of Connecticut Symposium on Asbestos Litigation (2005), and the Brooklyn Law School Science for Judges Program (2006). He is also founding co-sponsor (with Professors Charles Yablon and Anthony Sebok of Cardozo Law School) of the New York Faculty Seminar on the Social and Economic Aspects of Mass Tort Litigation. In 2008 he organized the (San Francisco) Bay Area Civil Procedure Forum, which is sponsored by the UC-Berkeley, Stanford, UC-Davis, UC Hastings, and USF law schools. The Forum provides an opportunity for scholars in and out of the academy to discuss cutting edge research and analysis in civil procedure and related areas.
Hanlon’s recent articles include "Asbestos Changes," in the N.Y.U. Annual Survey of American Law (2007); "Federal Asbestos Legislation: Wrestling with the Medical Issues," in the Brooklyn Journal of Science & Public Policy (2007), "Elegy for the FAIR Act," in the Connecticut Insurance Law Journal (2006), and "Punitive Damages: Beyond Dogma" in The Green Bag (2003).
Education:
A.B, University of Chicago (1967)M.A., Harvard University (1969)
Ph.D., Harvard University (1974)
J.D., Harvard Law School (1976)
