The William L. Prosser Award will be presented on 6 January 2013 to Professor Jane Stapleton.
Nominators of this year's honoree note that she is an influential scholar on three continents. In her native Australia, she serves as a Research Professor of Law at the Australian National University College of Law in Canberra. Professor Stapleton is also a barrister of the High Court and the Supreme Court of New South Wales, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law.
In the United States, Professor Stapleton is the Ernest E. Smith Professor in Law at the School of Law University of Texas at Austin. She is also an Advisor to the current Third Restatement of Torts: Liability for Economic Harm and was the first foreign national to be elected as a Council Member of The American Law Institute.
In England, Professor Stapleton is currently a Statutory Visiting Professor of Law at Oxford University and an Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College. She is a past holder of the prestigious Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professor of Legal Science Chair at Cambridge University and an Honorary Bencher at Gray's Inn.
Her nominators focused on the rigor of her scholarship and the depth and breadth of her professional accomplishments. Her work focuses on the "law of obligations, liability and compensation systems, and ranges from comparative product liability to the philosophical foundations of common-law concepts such as causation, duty, and good faith." As noted by one of her nominators, Professor Stapleton's scholarship reflects her "penetrating insight into the areas of torts and product liability."
The Prosser Award was created and presented to its first recipient, Leon Green, in 1974. Subsequent winners include Fleming James Jr., Wex Malone, W. Page Keeton, John Wade, and Willard Pedrick. More recent honorees include Dan B. Dobbs, Guido Calabresi, Oscar Gray, Robert Rabin, and the Hon. Richard A. Posner. The award honors those who have made an outstanding contribution to the world of tort law scholarship.
In her time at the Faculty, Professor Stapleton conducted an interview which features in the Squire Law Library Eminent Scholars Archive.