Faculty - University of Virginia School of Law

CONTACT
ksa@virginia.edu
(434) 924-3616
Room WB179B

ASSISTANT
Pennie Newell

SUBJECTS
Torts, insurance law, environmental liability, product liability, toxic tort, property insurance, medical liability, tort theory, medical malpractice

C.V.

Kenneth S. Abraham

David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law
J.D., Yale Law School, 1971
A.B., Indiana University, 1967

Kenneth Abraham is one of the nation’s leading scholars and teachers in the fields of torts and insurance law. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council of the American Law Institute. He has been an advisor to the American Law Institute's Restatement of Torts (Third), was a co-author of the Institute's major study, Enterprise Responsibility for Personal Injury, and has served on many other boards and commissions concerned with tort law and insurance reform. He has been a consulting counsel and an expert witness in a variety of major insurance coverage cases, involving directors and officers liability, environmental cleanup liability, toxic tort, products liability and property insurance claims. He has also served as an arbitrator for the Dalkon Shield Claimants Trust, and resolved over 100 claims by women seeking damages for injuries caused by the Dalkon Shield intrauterine device, both in the United States and Europe.

In 2000 Abraham received the All-University of Virginia Outstanding Teacher Award, as well as the American Bar Association's Robert B. McKay Law Professor Award, given for outstanding contributions to tort and insurance law. In 2001 he was honored with a Distinguished Faculty Achievement Certificate from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, for "outstanding achievement in teaching, research, and public service.” Abraham has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and Case Western Reserve Law School. He taught for nine years at the University of Maryland Law School before coming to Virginia in 1983.

Abraham is the author of over 60 law review articles and five books. His first book, Distributing Risk: Insurance, Legal Theory, and Public Policy (1986), brought modern legal theory to the study of insurance law. His torts treatise, The Forms and Functions of Tort Law (4th ed. 2012), has become a basic text for first-year law students across the country. And his casebook, Insurance Law and Regulation (5th ed. 2010) has been used as the principal text in courses on insurance law in more than 100 American law schools.

Scholarship Profile: Insurance Law's Practical Theorist (Virginia Journal 1998)

Publications
Current Courses
All Courses
In the Media

"State Seldom Cracks Down on Insurance Companies and Their Adjusters" (South Florida Sun Sentinel, 07/15/2011)

"Fewer Civil Cases Go to Juries Due in Large Part to Cost" (The Virginian-Pilot, 02/09/2010)

"Debating Insurers' Antitrust Exemption" (NPR, 02/09/2010)

"Guest Blogger Kenneth Abraham: Four Conceptions of Insurance" (TortsProf Blog, 02/08/2010)

"Abraham Authors Book on History of Torts, Insurance" (Media-Newswire, 06/24/2008)

"Flood Victims Lose on Appeal" (USA Today , 08/03/2007)

"Law Professors Receive Distinction: BOV Appoints Three Professors as David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professors of Law" (Cavalier Daily, 10/04/2006)

"U.S. Senate Fights Deadlock on Medical Malpractice Limit" (International Herald Tribune, 05/09/2006)

"Man Cleared in Rape Sues Accuser" (Charlottesville Daily Progress, 12/14/2005)

"Law Firm Announces Job Cuts/Gentry Locke Rakes & Moore Is Reducing the Number of Attorneys and Staff" (The Roanoke Times, 09/15/2004)

"The Price of Life After 9/11" (The New York Times, 06/18/2004)

"Development of the Law Suffers as Use of ADR Increases, Critics Worry" (Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, 03/25/2004)

"Firms Seek to Cancel Enron's Insurance" (The Washington Post, 02/22/2002)