AUSTIN, Texas - The University of Texas School of Law today announced the hiring of Jane Stapleton, an internationally known authority on tort law and products liability.
Stapleton comes to Texas from the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, where she will continue to serve as Professor of Law in the Research School of Social Sciences, Australia's most prestigious research-only appointment. Stapleton joins the UT Law faculty this fall as the Ernest E. Smith Professor in Law.
Stapleton is also a statutory visiting professor of law at Oxford University, where she taught for a dozen years before moving to the Australian National University in 1997. Her scholarship centers on the private law of obligations, liability and compensation systems, and ranges from comparative product liability to the philosophical foundations of common law concepts like causation, duty, and good faith. She is the author of Disease and the Compensation Debate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) and Products Liability (London: Butterworths, 1994), and co-editor of Essays for Patrick Atiyah (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) and The Law of Obligations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
"Jane Stapleton is one of the world's leading experts on products liability law," said Bill Powers, dean of the UT School of Law. "She is an impressive scholar who brings great prestige to the Law School. And, as a products liability teacher myself, I am delighted to have her as a colleague, " added Powers, who was the reporter for the American Law Institute Restatement (Third) of Torts: Apportionment of Liability and is currently a reporter for the ALI Restatement of Torts: General Principles.
As a visiting professor, Stapleton has held the Ahrens Chair in Tort Law at Washburn University Law School, and served as professor of comparative private law at the European University Institute in Florence. She is a member of the editorial board of the Torts Law Journal , former editor of Oxford's Clarendon Law Series, and a member of the American Law Institute and adviser to its Restatement of Torts: General Principles.
She is currently acting as a consultant on Australia's largest class action, a multi-billion dollar claim against Esso/Exxon for economic loss arising from the disruption of gas supply. Her work has been cited with approval by appellate courts in all the major Commonwealth common law jurisdictions.
Her many recent well-known articles include "Tort, Insurance, and Ideology" (Modern Law Review, 1995), "Perspectives on Causation" (Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence, 4th Series, ed. J. Horder, 2000), and "Legal Cause: Cause-in-Fact and the Scope of Liability for Consequences" (Vanderbilt Law Review, 2001). She is currently finishing a book, tentatively titled, Unpacking Causation in Law.
Stapleton joins one of the strongest faculties in torts and product liability in the nation, which includes Dean Powers, and Professors David A. Anderson, '71, David W. Robertson, and Olin Guy Wellborn III. "I am delighted to be joining the UT School of Law," said Stapleton. "No law school in the United States has a stronger or more long-established research presence in my fields of interest: torts and the law of obligations more generally, such as products liability," she said.
"On my previous visits to the Law School, I have been struck both by the scholarly power and intense intellectual curiosity of the faculty, as well as their deep commitment to the full development of their students' capacities," Stapleton continued. "To me, UT School of Law offers an irresistible combination of the intellectual excellence of my Oxford experience and the dynamic excitement of teaching that characterize the elite educational institutions of the New World."