MICHAEL PRESSMAN

Michael Pressman is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law. He received his PhD (in philosophy) from the University of Southern California, his JD from Stanford Law School, and his MA and BA (both in philosophy) from Stanford University.

Prior to joining the law faculty at Utah, Professor Pressman was a law clerk to Judge Bacharach on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, a law clerk to Judge Garaufis on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, a research fellow at the Civil Jury Project at NYU School of Law, an associate in the insurance litigation group in the San Diego office of Sheppard Mullin, a fellow at the Yale Law School Center for Private Law, and, most recently, a fellow and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School’s Project on the Foundations of Private Law.

Professor Pressman’s scholarship focuses on private law, philosophy, and their intersection. His legal scholarship to date has focused primarily on torts, contracts, and private law remedies. Within philosophy, his research has focused on questions in normative ethics about value and how to quantify and aggregate it. And his work in philosophy has substantially informed his legal scholarship: In his legal scholarship, he uses philosophical tools to examine questions of fairness and efficiency (and their intersection) in private law, and his training and scholarship in philosophical value theory and utilitarianism, in particular, provide a unique lens for doing so. Although his legal scholarship has various strands, two specific areas of recent focus have been (1) examinations into how tort law should value lost life-years, and (2) examinations of puzzles about how we should take into account various forms of baseline risk levels in tort law.