Richard Wright Named IIT Distinguished Professor of Law

The Illinois Institute of Technology Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of Richard W. Wright as a Distinguished Professor of Law at Chicago-Kent College of Law. Distinguished professor is the highest faculty rank at the university, and is reserved for a small number of senior faculty members, nominated by their own faculties and deans and approved by a university-wide committee of existing distinguished professors and chairs.

A member of the Chicago-Kent faculty since 1985, Professor Wright’s teaching and research focus on domestic and comparative tort law, jurisprudence, law and economics, and law and artificial intelligence. Prior to 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.

Professor Wright has also been a visiting professor at the University of Texas School of Law; a visiting lecturer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the Universidad Torcuato di Tella Law School in Argentina; a visiting fellow at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where he delivered the Sir George Turner Lectures and taught in the graduate law program; and a visiting fellow at Brasenose College and visiting lecturer in 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. Professor Wright’s published work appears in several international collections of leading scholarship on tort law and legal philosophy.

Professor Wright is a 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. Professor Wright is a member of the Advisory Board of the Torts, Product Liability and Insurance Law Journal of the Social Science Research Network and the Board of Advisers of the Journal of Tort Law and the Center for Justice and Democracy.

Professor Wright earned a bachelor of science degree with honors from the California Institute of Technology. He graduated summa cum laude from Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, where he was editor-in-chief of the law review.  Professor Wright received his LL.M. from Harvard Law School.