Areas of Expertise
- Civil Procedure
- Legal Ethics
- Evidence
Education
- B.A., Harvard (1963)
- M.A. (English), Stanford (1964)
- J.D., Harvard (1967)
Detailed Biography
John Leubsdorf is Professor and Judge Lacey Distinguished Scholar at Rutgers Law School.
After clerking for Chief Judge Bailey Aldrich of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, Prof. Leubsdorf practiced in Boston as an associate and partner at Foley Hoag, where he headed the firm’s public interest program and helped represent the plaintiffs in the Boston school desegregation case. Since leaving practice, he has served on the faculties of Boston University and Rutgers-Newark Law Schools, and as a Visiting Professor at Columbia, Cornell and U.C. Berkeley. His main courses are Civil Procedure, Evidence and Professional Responsibility and he has also taught variants such as Legal Malpractice, Injunctions, Complex Litigation and Multinational Litigation as well as other courses.
Many of his articles fall in the area of Professional Responsibility; others concern Civil Procedure, Evidence, Law & Literature and Constitutional Law. He was an Associate Reporter for the Restatement of the Law Governing Lawyers. In 2005, he held a Fulbright Scholarship to study French legal ethics, a project that gave rise to a book and several articles. He was the Reporter for the ABA Task Force on Lawyers’ Political Contributions (1998) and the New York State Bar Association’s Special Committee on Multidisciplinary Practice (1999), and has also been a member of the New Jersey Supreme Court Commission on Professional Conduct (2001-02) and the Ethics Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (2002-05).
Recent Books, Essays, Articles
- Man In His Original Dignity: Legal Ethics in France (Ashgate, 2001)
- Associate Reporter, American Law Institute, Restatement of the Law Governing Lawyers (2000)
- James, Hazard & Leubsdorf, Civil Procedure (4th ed. 1992; 5th ed. 2001)
- "Presuppositions of Evidence Law", 91 Iowa L. Rev. 1209 (2006)
- "Against Lawyer Retaining Liens, 72 Fordham L. Rev. 849 (2004)
- "The Structure of Judicial Opinions", 86 Minn. L. Rev. 447 (2001)
- "On the History of French Legal Ethics", 8 U. Chi. L. School Roundtable 341 (2001)
- The Myth of Civil Procedure Reform, in Civil Justice in Crisis (Oxford University Press, 1999)
- The Independence of the Bar in France: Learning from Comparative Legal Ethics, in Lawyers= Practice and Ideals: A Comparative View (Kluwer, 1999)
- Gandhi's Legal Ethics, 51 Rutgers L. Rev. 923 (1999)
- Legal Malpractice and Professional Responsibility, 48 Rutgers L. Rev. 101 (1995)
- Pluralizing the Client-Lawyer Relationship, 77 Cornell L. Rev. 825 (1992)
- Deconstructing the Constitution, 40 Stanford L. Rev. 181 (1987)
- Theories of Judging and Judge Disqualification, 62 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 237 (1987)
