Richard Epstein

Epstein's father, Bernard Epstein (1908–1978), was a radiologist, and his mother, Catherine Epstein (née Reiser; 1908–2004), managed his father's medical office.

He has two sisters.

He attended elementary school at P.S.161, a school that is now one of the Success Academy Charter Schools.

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.

He also serves as the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law emeritus and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

According to James W. Ely Jr., Epstein's writings have had a "pervasive influence on American legal thought."

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

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

Epstein and his family lived in Brooklyn until 1954, when his father began working at the Long Island Jewish Medical Center and their family moved to Great Neck, Long Island.

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

He 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.

He graduated with a B.A., summa cum laude, in 1964.

Epstein's undergraduate performance earned him a Kellett Fellowship, an award at Columbia that pays for two of each year's top graduates to spend two years in England studying at either Cambridge University or Oxford University; Epstein chose Oxford, where he studied jurisprudence at Oriel College.

He received a B.A. with first-class honours in 1966, and then returned to the United States to attend Yale Law School.

Because he had an English law degree, Epstein entered Yale as a transfer student with second-year standing.

He graduated in 1968 with an LL.B., cum laude.

After graduating from law school, Epstein became an assistant professor at the Gould School of Law of the University of Southern California (USC).

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

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

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

In 1983, he was made a senior fellow at the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago Medical School, and, in 1985, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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.

In the book, Epstein argued that the "Takings Clause" of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—which reads, "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation", and is traditionally viewed as a limit on the governmental power of eminent domain—gives constitutional protection to citizens' economic rights, and so requires the government to be regarded the same as any other private entity in a property dispute.

The argument was controversial and sparked a great deal of debate on the interpretation of the takings clause after the book's publication.

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

During Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court Justice confirmation hearings in 1991, then-Senator Joe Biden, "in a dramatic movement", held the book up and "repeatedly interrogated" Thomas about his position on the book's thesis.

The book served as a focal point in the argument about the government's ability to control private property.

It has also influenced how some courts view property rights and been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court four times, including in the 1992 case Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council.

In 2000, a study published in The Journal of Legal Studies identified Epstein as the 12th-most cited legal scholar of the 20th century; in 2008, he was chosen in a poll by Legal Affairs as one of the most influential modern legal thinkers.

Since 2001, 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.

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

In 2003, Epstein received an honorary LL.D. degree from the University of Ghent, and in 2018 he received an honorary doctorate in law from the University of Siegen.

In 2005, the College of William & Mary awarded him the Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize for his contributions to the field of property rights.

A study of legal publications between 2009 and 2013 found Epstein to be the third-most frequently cited American legal scholar during that period, behind only Cass Sunstein and Erwin Chemerinsky.

In a 2021 examination by Fred R. Shapiro, Epstein was the fifth most-cited legal scholar of all time.

Epstein formally retired from Chicago in 2010, but quickly came out of retirement to join the faculty of the New York University School of Law as its inaugural Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law.

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

In 2011, he was awarded a Bradley Prize by the Bradley Foundation.

In 2013, NYU Law established a new academic research center, the Classical Liberal Institute, and named Epstein its inaugural director.