Spring Reunion 2022
Nora Freeman Engstrom, JD ’02
Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law and Co-Director, Stanford Center on the Legal Profession
Professor Nora Freeman Engstrom is a nationally recognized expert in both tort law and legal ethics. Much of her work explores the day-to-day operation of the tort system and particularly the tort system’s interaction with alternative compensation mechanisms, such as no-fault automobile insurance, the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, and workers’ compensation. Professor Engstrom has also written extensively on trial practice, complex litigation (including MDLs), attorney advertising, alternative litigation finance, contingency fees, tort reform, and law firms she calls “settlement mills”—high-volume personal injury law practices that heavily advertise and mass-produce the resolution of claims.
Professor Engstrom is the Co-Director of the Stanford Center on the Legal Profession. She also serves as a Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Third) of Torts: Concluding Provisions and as an Adviser to the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Third) of Torts: Remedies.
Beyond that, Professor Engstrom co-authors a leading professional responsibility casebook, Legal Ethics (with Deborah Rhode, David Luban, and Scott Cummings), as well as the classic torts casebook, Tort Law and Alternatives (with Marc Franklin, Robert Rabin, Michael Green, and Mark Geistfeld). Her scholarly work has appeared in a wide array of law journals, including the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the NYU Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, and the Michigan Law Review, among many others.
Before joining Stanford’s faculty in 2009, Professor Engstrom was a Research Dean’s Scholar at Georgetown University Law Center and an associate at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP. She was also a law clerk to Judge Merrick B. Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Before that, she worked at the U.S. Department of Justice, focusing on terrorism and national security issues. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 1997, summa cum laude, and from Stanford Law School in 2002, with Distinction and as a member of Order of the Coif.
Professor Engstrom is an elected member of the American Law Institute, a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and member of the World Tort Law Society. She also serves as an elected member of the Executive Committee of the Section on Torts and Compensation Systems of the AALS, and, from 2016 through 2018, she served as Stanford Law School’s Associate Dean for Curriculum.
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