Walter K. Olson

Walter Olson is a commentator, author, and critic best known for his work on the American litigation system. A longtime senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, he has written three widely acclaimed books on the American litigation system: The Litigation Explosion, The Excuse Factory, and The Rule of Lawyers. His writing appears regularly in such publications as the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, and he writes a regular column on American law for the Times Online (U.K.). His approximately 400 broadcast appearances include "Crossfire", the "Lehrer News Hour", CNN "NewsNight", and "Oprah". In addition to editing PointofLaw.com, he founded and continues to run the popular Overlawyered.com weblog. He has frequently given testimony before lawmakers and advised public officials; the Washington Post has dubbed him an "intellectual guru of tort reform."

  Articles by Walter K. Olson
  CONTACT: editor - at - [this domain name]

James R. Copland

Jim Copland is the director of the Center for Legal Policy at the Manhattan Institute. Under Mr. Copland's stewardship, the Center has published recent work on asbestos, class actions, and "toxic mold" litigation. The Center's 2003 report, Trial Lawyers, Inc.: A Report on the Lawsuit Industry in America, received favorable press attention on various television news channels, radio programs, and print sources including The Economist and The Wall Street Journal.

  Articles by James R. Copland
  CONTACT: jcopland - at - [this domain name]

David Bernstein

A professor at the George Mason University School of Law, David Bernstein is a scholar of wide-ranging interests, including torts, products liability, and scientific and expert evidence. He is co-author of the most extensive treatise to date on expert evidence and co-editor of Phantom Risk: Scientific Inference and the Law. Professor Bernstein is also a contributor to the popular weblog, The Volokh Conspiracy.

Michael DeBow

A professor at both the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University and the School of Public Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Michael DeBow is a leading researcher on the states' lawsuits against the tobacco companies, judicial selection mechanisms, and the politics of legal reform. He also contributes to the weblog Southern Appeal.

Ted Frank

Ted Frank, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy, and director of the AEI Legal Center, has been writing for Overlawyered.com since 2003. Before joining AEI, Ted was an attorney at law firms in Washington and Los Angeles for ten years, with experience in products liability, class actions, antitrust, intellectual property, and commercial litigation. Sits on the Federalist Society's Litigation Practice Group Executive Committee.

Martin Grace

Martin Grace is a professor of risk management and insurance at Georgia State University, as well as the associate director of the school's Center for Risk Management and Insurance Research and an associate of the school's Fiscal Research Center. He also has his own blog on tort law, liability, and insurance, RiskProf.

Marie Gryphon

Marie Gryphon is a Senior Fellow with the Center for Legal Policy. As an attorney in private practice, she worked on ERISA, securities, class action, commercial contract, legal malpractice, and constitutional law cases. She has also been a legal and policy analyst with the Cato Institute, working on issues related to education policy. Her articles have appeared in Business Week, the Washington Post, the Dallas Morning News, the Star-Ledger, Forbes, FoxNews.com, National Review Online, and the Orange County Register. She holds a J.D. from the University of Washington School of Law and is a Ph.D. candidate in public policy at Harvard University.

Tom Kirkendall

Tom Kirkendall, a prominent Houston lawyer, opened his own practice in 2002 after twenty years at Maddox, Perrin & Kirkendall, a business litigation firm he helped found in 1981. His areas of expertise include securities law, bankruptcy, and corporate reorganization. He writes the popular blog Houston's Clear Thinkers.

Michael Krauss

Michael Krauss, a professor at the George Mason School of Law, is nationally known for his research in torts and legal ethics. He is a leading scholar of the government "recoupment" lawsuits against the tobacco and gun industries, and he recently co-authored the second edition of Legal Ethics in a Nutshell.

Larry Ribstein

Larry Ribstein is the Richard W. and Marie L. Corman Professor at the University of Illinois College of Law. During his 15-year tenure at the George Mason University School of Law, Professor Ribstein played a vital role in curriculum and program development. An expert on corporate and securities law and the author of the popular Ideoblog, his articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, and numerous other publications.

Jonathan B. Wilson

A seasoned technology attorney, Jonathan B. Wilson has experience in corporate, securities, technology, and intellectual property law. He currently serves as vice president and general counsel of Interland, Inc., an internet services company, and he founded and chairs the American Bar Association's Internet Industry Committee. Jonathan has just released a book, Out of Balance: Prescriptions for Reforming the American Litigation System, outlining his ideas for legal reform.

Stephen Bainbridge

A professor of law at UCLA, Stephen Bainbridge is a scholar on a variety of subjects, but with a strong emphasis on the law and economics of public corporations. His books include Corporation Law and Economics and Securities Law-Insider Trading. He runs his own legal weblog, ProfessorBainbridge.com.

Lester Brickman

Lester Brickman is a professor of law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. His areas of expertise include administrative alternatives to mass tort litigation, asbestos litigation, and contingency fee reform. Professor Brickman has written extensively on these and other topics, he has testified at congressional hearings, and he is widely quoted in the press.

Richard Epstein

The James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago and the Peter and Kirstin Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Richard Epstein is one of the most nation’s most prolific legal scholars, with writings spanning almost every area of private law. He authored his first book on tort law almost 25 years ago, and he is editor of one of the leading torts casebooks.

Philip K. Howard

Phil Howard is the vice-chairman of Covington & Burling and the author of two best-selling books on lawsuit abuse, The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America and The Collapse of the Common Good: How America's Lawsuit Culture Undermines Our Freedom. He has contributed the American Law section of the Oxford Companion to American Law for nearly 40 years. More recently, Howard has served as founder and chair of the bipartisan legal reform coalition Common Good, which advocates holistic changes to the tort system.

Daniel P. Kessler

An expert on health care management and medical malpractice reform, Daniel Kessler is a professor at Stanford Business School and Stanford Law School and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His seminal work with Mark McClellan has quantified the effects of medical malpractice liability rules on medical practice. Professor Kessler continues to publish on health care policy, industrial organization, antitrust, and other issues in law and economics journals.

Stephen Presser

Stephen Presser, professor at Northwestern Law School and School of Management, is one of the leading scholars in the field of corporations, particularly on the issue of shareholder liability for corporate debts. He has authored a leading casebook in the field, An Introduction to the Law of Business Organizations. He is also considered an expert in legal history and constitutional law, a title he has earned as editor of the preeminent legal history casebook, as author of the compelling originalist treatise Recapturing the Constitution, and as a regular expert witness to the U.S. Congress on constitutional law issues.

George Priest

George Priest is the John M. Olin Professor of Law and Economics at Yale Law School. One of the nation's foremost antitrust scholars, he is also the author of a wide number of articles and monographs on the subjects of product liability, tort law, insurance litigation, and settlement.

Alexander Tabarrok

Alex Tabarrok is a professor of economics at George Mason University, research director at the Independent Institute, and a research fellow at the Mercatus Center. Along with Eric Helland, he has conducted much of the leading empirical work of the last decade on the law and economics of tort, including research on the effects of judicial election and selection systems on tort awards. Professor Tabarrok co-authors the law and economics weblog MarginalRevolution.com, one of the most widely read economics blogs on the internet, as well as the extensive FDA policies and reform website FDAReview.org.