Professor Kenneth Abraham To Receive AALS’ Highest Award in Torts Field

Professor Kenneth S. Abraham will receive the 2024 Prosser Award from the Association of American Law Schools Section on Torts and Compensation Systems. Abraham, who has taught at the University of Virginia School of Law since 1983, is one of the nation’s leading scholars, teachers and consultants in both torts and insurance law.

Named in honor of William L. Prosser, a seminal figure in the field of torts, the award recognizes lifetime contributions to scholarship, teaching and service in the torts field. Prosser’s treatise, “Prosser on Torts,” has been a staple for law students and lawyers for decades, along with the casebook, “Prosser and Keeton on Torts.” Prosser also led the Restatement (Second) of Torts, a key summary of common law tort rules in the United States. Abraham will receive his award at the annual AALS meeting in January.

Abraham is the author of more than 70 law review articles and six books, and his own torts treatise, “The Forms and Functions of Tort Law,” has also become a basic text for first-year law students across the country. His casebook, “Insurance Law and Regulation,” has been used as the principal text in courses on insurance law in more than 100 American law schools. His first book, “Distributing Risk: Insurance, Legal Theory, and Public Policy,” written in 1986, brought modern legal theory to the study of insurance law.

In practice, Abraham has been consulting counsel and an expert witness in a variety of major insurance coverage cases, involving commercial general liability, directors and officers liability, environmental cleanup liability, toxic tort and products liability, and property insurance claims. He has also served as an arbitrator for the Dalkon Shield Claimants Trust, resolving more than 100 claims by women seeking damages for injuries caused by the Dalkon Shield intrauterine device, both in the United States and Europe.

Abraham is a life member of the American Law Institute and for 20 years he served on ALI’s Council — the board of lawyers, judges and academics that governs the Institute. He is also an adviser to the ALI’s Restatement of Torts (Third) and was the senior advisor to the Restatement of the Law of Liability Insurance. He has served on a number of other boards and commissions concerned with tort law and insurance reform, and he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Historic Prosser Award recipients have included Fleming James, Wex Malone, Page Keeton, John Wade and Willard Pedrick. More recently, the award has recognized Judges Guido Calabresi and Richard Posner of the Second and Seventh Circuits, respectively.