Benjamin Zipursky

Who is Benjamin Zipursky?

Benjamin Zipursky is a legal scholar and professor at Fordham Law in New York City. He has been interviewed by the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, the Los Angeles Times, The Associated Press on the Vioxx wrongful death cases. As an author of the casebook Tort Law: Responsibilities and Redress, he is nationally recognized as a scholar on Torts.

He is also a noted scholar in jurisprudence and legal philosophy, he has having written on The Philosophy of Private Law in the Oxford Companion to Jurisprudence and Legal Philosophy. Contrary to libertarian views of self-help popularized by the likes of Robert Nozick, Zipursky argues that the right to private ordering must yield to public order lest we break down in an endless chain of tit-for-tat. In addition, he has written on theory of torts in Philosophy and the Law of Torts.

He co-authored with John C. P. Goldberg of Vanderbilt University The Moral of MacPherson which explained how Judge Benjamin Cardozo's opinion which removed privity of contract remained true to the idea of duty. The article compared how U.S. Constitutional Law changed from the idea of rights in Lochner v. New York to the New Deal rule of West Coast Hotel v. Parrish with how duty changed from Winterbottom v. Wright which limited the class of plaintiffs to whom the defendant owed a duty of care to MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co. when the class of protected plaintiffs expanded beyond only those who share a privity of contract with the defendant. It argued that scholars like Dean Prosser were wrong to attribute the change to the elimination of duty but rather argued that privity should not stand in the way for an expanded duty of defendants who are manufacturers who place products in the stream of commerce.