People

Faculty

Henry Smith, Director

Henry Smith is the Fessenden Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, where he directs the Project on the Foundations of Private Law. Previously, he taught at the Northwestern University School of Law and was the Fred A. Johnston Professor of Property and Environmental Law at Yale Law School. He holds an A.B. from Harvard, a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford, and a J.D. from Yale. After law school he clerked for the Hon. Ralph K. Winter, United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Smith has written primarily on the law and economics of property and intellectual property, with a focus on how property-related institutions lower information costs and constrain strategic behavior. He teaches primarily in the areas of property, intellectual property, natural resources, remedies, taxation, and law and economics. His books include The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Property (2010, coauthored with Thomas W. Merrill), Property: Principles and Policies (2d ed, 2012, coauthored with Thomas W. Merrill), and Principles of Patent Law (6th ed., 2013, co-authored with F. Scott Kieff, Pauline Newman, and Herbert F. Schwartz). He is the coeditor of The Research Handbook on the Economics of Property Law (2011, with Kenneth Ayotte), Philosophical Foundations of Property Law (2013, with James Penner), and Perspectives on Property Law (4th ed., in press, with Robert C. Ellickson and Carol M. Rose).

---

Affiliated Faculty

Molly Brady

Molly Brady is a professor of law at Harvard Law School, where she teaches property law and related subjects. Her scholarship uses historical analyses of property institutions and land use doctrines to explore broader theoretical questions. Her current research projects involve the relationship between covenants and zoning, the persistence of community knowledge in property doctrine, and state constitutional takings law. She is also an Associate Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Fourth Restatement of Property. Previously, Professor Brady taught at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she received the 2019 UVA Student Council Distinguished Teaching Award, the 2018 Z Society Distinguished Faculty Award for “one outstanding member of the University’s faculty who has positively impacted the student body,” and an invitation to the Seven Society 27th Annual Monticello Dinner Series for “exemplary scholarship and transformative instruction of students.” Her recent article, “The Forgotten History of Metes and Bounds,” won both the Association of American Law Schools’ Scholarly Papers Prize for junior faculty members in their first five years of law teaching and the American Society for Legal History’s William Nelson Cromwell Article Prize for the year’s best paper by an early-career scholar. Professor Brady received an AB summa cum laude in history from Harvard College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and was awarded the Harvard-Radcliffe Foundation for Women’s Athletics Prize for the top female scholar-athlete. Professor Brady then obtained her JD from Yale Law School, where she was the two-time recipient of the Parker Prize for legal history scholarship and was awarded the Quintin Johnstone Prize in Real Property Law, the Jewell Prize for an outstanding contribution to a Yale Law School journal, and the Cullen Prize for the best paper written by a first-year student. Following graduation, she served as a clerk to Judge Bruce M. Selya on the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and practiced at Ropes and Gray in Boston as a corporate associate focusing on intellectual property transactions. After leaving practice, she was in the first graduating class of the PhD in Law program at Yale University.

---

John Goldberg

John Goldberg, an expert in tort law, tort theory, and political philosophy, joined the Law School faculty in 2008. From 1995 until then, he was a faculty member of Vanderbilt Law School, where he served as Associate Dean for Research (2006-08). He is co-author of The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Torts (2010) and Tort Law: Responsibilities and Redress (4th ed. 2016). He has also published dozens of articles and essays in scholarly journals. Goldberg has taught an unusually broad array of first-year and upper-level courses, and has received multiple teaching prizes. A member of the editorial board of Legal Theory and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Tort Law, he served in 2009 as Chair of the Torts and Compensation Systems Section of the Association of American Law Schools. After receiving his J.D. in 1991 from New York University School of Law, Goldberg clerked for Judge Jack Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York and for Justice Byron White. He earned his B.A. with high honors from the College of Social Studies, Wesleyan University. He also holds an M. Phil. in Politics from Oxford University and an M.A. in Politics from Princeton University. Before joining the Vanderbilt faculty, he briefly practiced law in Boston.

---

Ruth Okediji

Ruth Okediji is the Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and co-Director of the Berkman Klein Center. She previously taught at the University of Minnesota Law School where she held the William L. Prosser Professorship and a McKnight Endowed Presidential Professorship. Professor Okediji writes on global knowledge governance and international aspects of IP protection, with a focus on how harmonized copyright and patent law norms affect economic development in emerging economies. Her work has been influential in global debates about IP reform, and in guiding national strategies for pro-competitive and pro-development implementation of multilateral and regional IP treaties in countries throughout Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas.  Professor Okediji served on the National Academies’ Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy Committee on the Impact of Copyright Policy on Innovation in the Digital Era, and she has advised numerous governments, regional economic bodies, and intergovernmental organizations on various aspects of patent, copyright, and trademark law. In 2015, Okediji was appointed by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon to serve on his High Level Panel on Access to Medicines, and Managing Intellectual Property named her one of the world’s most influential people in intellectual property law. She is the author of a number of books and casebooks including Copyright in a Global Information Economy (with Julie Cohen, Maureen O’Rourke and Lydia Loren, Aspen, 4th Ed. 2015), International Patent Law and Policy (with Margo A. Bagley, Aspen, 2013), Global Perspectives on Patent Law (with Margo A. Bagley), The World Blind Union Guide to the Marrakesh Treaty (with Laurence Helfer, Molly Land and Jerome Reichman, Oxford University Press, 2017), and Copyright Law in An Age of Limitations and Exceptions (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Okediji has received numerous teaching awards and honors for her scholarly work. She was elected to the American Law Institute (ALI) in 2008, and has served as President of the Order of the Coif since 2016.

---

J. Mark Ramseyer

J. Mark Ramseyer is the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. Professor Ramseyer spent most of his childhood in provincial towns and cities in southern Japan, attending Japanese schools for K-6. He returned to the U.S. for college. Before attending law school, he studied Japanese history in graduate school. Ramseyer graduated from HLS in 1982. He clerked for the Hon. Stephen Breyer (then on the First Circuit), worked for two years at Sidley & Austin (in corporate tax), and studied as a Fulbright student at the University of Tokyo. After teaching at UCLA and the University of Chicago, he came to Harvard in 1998. He has also taught or co-taught courses at several Japanese universities (in Japanese). In his research, Ramseyer primarily studies Japanese law, and primarily from a law & economics perspective. In addition to a variety of Japanese law courses, he teaches the basic Corporations course. With Professors Klein and Bainbridge, he co-edits a Foundation Press casebook in the field.

---

Robert H. Sitkoff

Robert H. Sitkoff is the John L. Gray Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. An expert in wills, trusts, estates, and fiduciary administration, he was the youngest professor with tenure to receive a chair in the history of the school. Sitkoff’s research focuses on economic and empirical analysis of trusts, estates, and fiduciary administration. His work has been published in leading scholarly journals such as the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, and the Journal of Law and Economics. Sitkoff is the lead coauthor of Wills, Trusts, and Estates (Aspen 10th ed. 2017), the most popular American coursebook on trusts and estates, and he is an editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Fiduciary Law, to be published by Oxford University Press. Sitkoff is an active participant in trusts and estates law reform. He serves under Massachusetts gubernatorial appointment on the Uniform Law Commission (ULC). Within the ULC, he was Chair of the Drafting Committee for the Uniform Directed Trust Act and he is a liaison member of the Joint Editorial Board for Uniform Trusts and Estates Acts. Within the American Law Institute, Sitkoff is a member of the Council, the Institute’s Board of Directors, and he is a member of the Council’s Projects Committee. Sitkoff edits the Wills, Trusts, and Estates abstracting journal in the Social Science Research Network, is a past chair of the Section on Trusts and Estates of the Association of American Law Schools, and is an academic fellow of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel.

---

Postdoctoral Fellows

Michael Pressman

Michael Pressman is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Project on the Foundations of Private Law. His scholarship bridges law, philosophy, and their intersection. His legal scholarship to date has focused primarily on torts, contracts, and private law remedies. Within philosophy, his research has focused on questions about value and how to quantify and aggregate it. And his scholarship has increasingly come to be concerned with areas in which philosophical work in value theory can and should inform the values identified by private law remedies. In particular, one focus has been on how tort law should value lost life-years. Another recent focus has been on examining questions pertaining to the loss-of-chance doctrine in tort damages. His CV is available here.

Sam Bookman

Sam Bookman is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Project on the Foundations of Private Law. His scholarship focuses on the legal challenges raised by global climate change, and in particular, the ways in which climate change raises novel questions about the theory and practice of public nuisance claims. He has taught classes related to climate change at Harvard, Boston College, and Melbourne Law Schools, and his work has appeared in Environmental Law, the Utah Law Review, the Modern Law Review, and the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, among other publications. His full CV can be found here.

Student Fellows

---

Past Academic Fellows

---

---