Professor Wright's teaching and research focus on domestic and comparative tort law, jurisprudence, law and economics, and law and artificial intelligence. His published work appears in several international collections of leading scholarship on tort law and legal philosophy. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute and has been an active participant in its revision of the Restatement of the Law Third on Torts, including serving as an Adviser to the Reporters for the Restatement on Apportionment of Liability. He also has served as a member of the executive committee and as chair of the Section on Torts and Compensation Systems of the Association of American Law Schools. He is a member of the advisory boards of the Journal of Tort Law, the Center for Justice and Democracy, and the Torts, Product Liability and Insurance Law Journal of the Social Science Research Network. Professor Wright received his J.D. degree, summa cum laude, from Loyola University in Los Angeles, where he graduated first in his class and was editor-in-chief of the law review, and an LL.M. degree from Harvard University. Before entering the academy, he worked in the Solicitor's Office of the U.S. Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C., and as a legal adviser and project leader in the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress. Before joining the Chicago-Kent faculty, he was a member of the faculty of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, where he received the Monrad G. Paulsen Award for outstanding contributions to legal education. He has been a visiting professor, fellow and/or lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, the Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Argentina, the University of Melbourne in Australia, the University of Palermo in Italy, the Universities of Gdańsk and Wrocław in Poland, and Brasenose College and the Faculty of Law at the University of Oxford in England, where he co-taught seminars in the Bachelor of Civil Law graduate law program.
Articles
Liability for Possible Wrongs: Causation, Statistical Probability and the Burden of Proof, in Symposium, The Frontiers of Tort Law, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review (2008)
Courts around the world are increasingly considering whether liability should exist in various types of...
The Principles of Product Liability, in Symposium, Products Liability: Litigation Trends on the 10th Anniversary of the Third Restatement, The Review of Litigation (2007)
Hand, Posner, and the Myth of the "Hand Formula", in Symposium, Negligence in the Law, Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2003)
There is a striking incongruence between the discussions of negligence in the legal literature, including...
The Grounds and Extent of Legal Responsibility, in Symposium, What Do Compensatory Damages Compensate?, San Diego Law Review (2003)
This article identifies and discusses the three principal limitations on the extent of legal responsibility...
Justice and Reasonable Care in Negligence Law, American Journal of Jurisprudence (2002)
The academic literature generally assumes that an aggregate-risk-utility test is employed to determine whether conduct...
Books
Contributions to Books
The NESS Account of Natural Causation: A Response to Criticisms, Perspectives on Causation (2011)
Other
The Vitality of Joint and Several Liability: Brief Amici Curiae of American Law Professors in Support of Respondents (2002)
Tort reform advocates hoped to use a recent case, Norfolk & Western Railway Co. v....