2018 Fleming Lecture
Delivered by Jane Stapleton
Wednesday, November 14th, 2018
11:20 am to 12:45 pm
Room 105 Berkeley Law, Overflow Room 140
Professor Jane Stapleton currently serves as the Master of Christ’s College at Cambridge University. A native Australian, she began her academic career as a scientist, earning her Phd from the University from Adelaide. She went on to obtain her law degree from the Australian National University and then a doctorate in law from Oxford University. Drawing on her dissertation, Professor Stapleton published “Disease and the Compensation Debate” which immediately established her as a rising star in the field of torts.
Over the years of her career, before taking up her current position at Cambridge, she has, among other things, been a law professor at Oxford, the University of Texas and the Australian National University. At ANU Professor Stapleton served as co-director of the John Fleming Center. She has, as well, been a visiting professor at many distinguished law schools including Harvard and Columbia.
A major focus of Professor Stapleton’s research in the last ten years has been on causation in law, philosophy and science. She has acted as a consultant in commercial, pharmaceutical, medical and environmental litigation in the US and UK.
Over the years, in addition to troves of journal articles and book chapters, Professor Stapleton has published additional books including “Product Liability” and was co-editor of “The Law of Obligations” honoring Professor John Fleming.
Professor Stapleton currently serves on the Council of the American Law Institute, a very special appointment for a non-American scholar. She recently delivered the prestigious Clarendon Lectures at Oxford. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, a singular honor. She is the only non-US recipient of two very distinguished awards – the Prosser Prize in Torts from the Association of American Law Schools and the Robert B. McKay Law Professor Award from the American Bar Association.
John Gunther Fleming, 1919-1997
UC Berkeley Professor of Law
About John G. Fleming:
Professor John G. Fleming, who taught at Berkeley for several decades, was the leading comparative tort law scholar of his generation. His famous treatise, Fleming’s The Law of Torts, now available in its 10th edition, brings together the work of leading torts scholars from the U.K., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the U.S. to illustrate the principles of tort law. After his death, the Fleming Prize was established. It has now been awarded to some of the most respected torts scholars in the world.
Previous Fleming Prize Winners:
Lewis N. Klar, Q.C., University of AlbertaHarold Luntz, University of Melbourne
Judge Guido Calabresi, Yale Law School
Justice Allen M. Linden, Osgoode Hall, Canada
Stephen Todd, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Sir Basil Markesinis, QC, DCL, FBA: University College, London
Robert L. Rabin, Stanford University
Michael D. Green, Wake Forest University
William C. Powers, Jr., University of Texas, Austin
Helmut Koziol, European Centre of Tort and Insurance Law