Open Book: Succeeding on Exams From the First Day of Law School

Education

J.D., Georgetown University Law Center, 1982
B.A., University of Chicago, 1978

Professor Friedman is one of the country's leading authorities on constitutional law and the federal courts. He is a prolific scholar, working at the intersections of law, politics and history. Friedman teaches a wide variety of courses including Constitutional Law, Federal Courts, and Criminal Procedure. He writes extensively about judicial review, constitutional law and theory, federal jurisdiction and judicial behavior. His scholarship appears regularly in the nation's top law and peer-edited reviews. He is the author of widely recognized The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2009), which examines the history of the relationship between popular opinion and the Supreme Court, from 1776 to the present. Professor Friedman is a frequent contributor to the nation's leading journals, both on-line and print. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, The Los Angeles Times, Politico and The New Republic, among others. Professor Friedman is a frequent speaker at events of all sorts. Given the interdisciplinary nature of his work, Professor Friedman regularly appears at conferences in law, political science and history. He is a founder and co-convener of the “roughly biennial” Constitutional Theory Conference. He organizes many multi-disciplinary conferences, including one on Modeling Law, and another – done under the auspices of the American Constitution Society – on Reconstruction: America's Second Founding. He presents papers regularly at home and abroad. He has been a visiting scholar and lecturer at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, the Groupe d’Etudes et de Recherches sur law Justice Constitutionnelle Aix-en-Provence, Sciences-Po in Aix-en-Provence, and Hong Kong University. Professor Friedman regularly serves as a litigator or litigation consultant in a variety of matters in the federal and state courts. He has represented a wide range of clients, both public and private. Notably, he represents both civil liberties claimants and state and local governments. He has been active in the areas of reproductive rights, the jurisdictional allocation of cases between the federal and state courts, and the proper scope of the federal government's commerce power. He has filed a number of amicus briefs with the U.S. Supreme Court. Actively engaged in a range of important service activities, at NYU Professor Friedman created the Academic Careers Program and founded and is now co-director of the Furman Academic Program. Both programs are dedicated to preparing young scholars for academic careers. He recently completed a term as Vice Dean of New York University School of Law.

Publications

The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009

"Reconstructing Reconstruction: Some Problems for Originalists (and Everyone Else, Too)," 11 Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 1201 (2009)

"Pulling Punches: Congressional Constraints on the Supreme Court's Constitutional Rulings, 1987-2000," 31 Legislative Studies Quarterly 533 (2006) (with Anna Harvey

"The Politics of Judicial Review," 84 Texas Law Review 257 (2005)

"Under the Law of Federal Jurisdiction: Allocating Cases between Federal and State Courts," 104 Columbia Law Review 1211 (2004)

Education
J.D. New York University
M.A. Princeton University
M. Phil. (Politics) Oxford University
B.A. Wesleyan University

Biography

John C.P. Goldberg, an expert in tort law, tort theory, and political philosophy, joined the Harvard Law School faculty in 2008. From 1995 until then, he was a faculty member of Vanderbilt Law School, where he served as Associate Dean for Research (2006-08). He is co-author of The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Torts (2010) and Tort Law: Responsibilities and Redress (2d ed. 2008). He has also published dozens of articles and essays in scholarly journals. Goldberg has taught an unusually broad array of first-year and upper-level courses, and has received multiple teaching prizes. A member of the editorial board of Legal Theory and a senior editor of the Journal of Tort Law, he served in 2009 as Chair of the Torts and Compensation Systems Section of the Association of American Law Schools. After receiving his J.D. in 1991 from New York University School of Law, Goldberg clerked for Judge Jack Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York and for Justice Byron White. He earned his B.A. with high honors from the College of Social Studies, Wesleyan University. He also holds an M. Phil. in Politics from Oxford University and an M.A. in Politics from Princeton University. Before joining the Vanderbilt faculty, he briefly practiced law in Boston.

Representative Publications

Books

Tort Law: Responsibilities and Redress (Aspen Publishers, 2004) (with A. Sebok & B. Zipursky)

Articles
"Tort Law and Moral Luck," 92 Cornell L. Review (forthcoming 2007) (with Benjamin Zipursky)

"Two Conceptions of Tort Damages: Fair v. Full Compensation," 55 DePaul Law Review 435 (2006)

"What Nobody Knows," 104 Michigan Law Review 1461 (2006)

"Accidents of the Great Society," 64 Maryland Law Review 364 (2005) (with Benjamin Zipursky)

"The Constitutional Status of Tort Law: Due Process and the Right to a Law for the Redress of Wrongs," 115 Yale Law Journal 527 (2005)

"Tort Law for Federalists (and the Rest of Us): Private Law in Disguise," 28 Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 3 (2004) (essay)

"Twentieth-Century Tort Theory," 91 Georgetown Law Journal 514 (2003)

"Unrealized Torts," 88 Virginia Law Review 1625 (2002) (with Benjamin Zipursky)
Presentations

"Ten Half-Truths About Tort Law," Monsanto Lecture (endowed lecture series addressing topics in tort law) to be delivered at Valparaiso University School of Law March 29, 2007 (forthcoming, Valparaiso Law Review)

View Professor Goldberg's SSRN page.