The University of Texas at Austin   School of Law

Education

• JD Harvard
• BA Stanford

Areas of Specialty

• Civil Procedure
• Class Actions
• Intellectual Property
• Trademarks

Professor Robert Bone is a leading scholar in the fields of civil procedure, complex litigation and intellectual property, known especially for his theoretical and interdisciplinary work. Before joining the University of Texas Law School faculty, he was Robert Kent Professor in Civil Procedure at Boston University.

Professor Bone has published numerous articles in leading law journals and essays in books, and has given many lectures and talks in the United States and other countries. One of his areas of specialty is the application of economic analysis to procedure issues. He has published a book entitled The Economics of Civil Procedure, which was translated into Japanese, and several major articles analyzing procedural issues from an economic as well as historical and jurisprudential perspective, including topics in the law of class actions, innovative case aggregation techniques, preclusion law, court rulemaking, and the nature of procedural rules. In addition to his work in procedure, Professor Bone is also well known for his scholarship in the field of intellectual property, especially in the areas of trademark and trade secret law. His forthcoming publications include a trademark article, Taking the Confusion Out of “Likelihood of Confusion”: Toward a More Sensible Approach to Trademark Infringement; three chapters in a book PROCEDURAL LAW AND ECONOMICS (“Discovery,” “Preclusion,” and “Class Actions”), and an article for a conference on the use of statistical sampling to adjudicate large case aggregations, A Normative Evaluation of Actuarial Litigation.

Following law school, Professor Bone clerked for United States District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity, Jr. and served as an associate at the Boston law firm of Hill & Barlow. He has visited at Harvard and Columbia and began his teaching career at the University of Southern California. Professor Bone was selected to give the 2000-2001 Boston University Lecture in honor of his scholarly achievements, and he received Boston University’s highest teaching award, the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching, in 1991. Professor Bone is a member of the American Law Institute.