Skip to content

All faculty

David Rosenberg

Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law, Emeritus

David Rosenberg is the Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He graduated from New York University Law School in 1967 and entered practice as an associate with Rabinowitz, Boudin and Standard in New York. He formed the firm of Rosenberg, Baker and Fine in Cambridge in 1972. He joined the Harvard faculty part-time in 1971 and full-time in 1979. His practice, study, teaching, and writing cover diverse subjects, including constitutional law, labor law, criminal law, federal courts, torts, environmental law, civil procedure, and litigation. His work pioneered the policy-oriented approach to complex litigation and mass torts, in particular, by applying theories of law enforcement, deterrence, insurance, and sampling to develop and justify the use of probabilistically proportioned liability and such collectivized modes of adjudication as class action, and more generally to create a new, socially responsible design of the civil liability system . Among Professor Rosenberg’s publications are Making Tort Law: What Should be Done and Who Should Do It (2003) (with Charles Fried); The Hidden Holmes: His Theory of Torts History (1995); A Solution to the Choice-of-Law Problem of Differing State Laws in Class Actions: Average Law, 79 George Washington Law Review (2011) (with Luke McCloud); Improve Medical Malpractice Law by Letting Health Care Insurers Take Charge, 39 Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 3 (2011) (with Kenneth Reinker); Mandatory-Litigation Class Action: The Only Option for Mass Tort Cases, 115 Harv. L. Rev. 831 (2002); The Causal Connection in Mass Exposure Case: A ‘Public Law’ Vision of the Tort System, 97 Harv. L. Rev. 849 (1984).