John H. Langbein, Sterling Professor of Law and Legal History, 1990-2016, and Professorial Lecturer in Law, 2015-
John H. Langbein
REFERENCES:
John H. Langbein joined the Law School faculty in 1990, after teaching at the University of Chicago. He is a preeminent authority on American trust, probate, pension, and investment law. His 1976 article, Market Funds and Trust Investment Law, coauthored with Richard Posner, introduced the portfolio theory of investments into trust law. In presenting the Center’s Simeon E. Baldwin Award to Langbein in 2015, YLS Sterling Professor and Center Director Roberta Romano stated that: “The article was a veritable intellectual earthquake. It caused a fundamental reorientation in the understanding of fiduciary obligations, in particular, the formulation of prudent person fiduciary standards, to be directed at the portfolio as a whole, and its diversification, rather than the risk of individual securities.” She concluded that, by freeing trustees to explore investment portfolios that did not consist solely of Treasury bonds, Langbein’s contribution “increased the wealth and thereby the welfare of countless Americans.”
Langbein is also a distinguished legal historian, focusing on Anglo-American and European legal history. YLS Allen Duffy/Class of 1960 Professor John Witt, on the occasion of Langbein’s receipt of the Simeon E. Baldwin Award, described Langbein’s early works as providing the insight that “a key difference among legal systems was their methods of proof,” which, in Langbein’s book, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Regime, advanced the evaluation of the use of torture in the Middle Ages as “the story of a system that had allowed its own high standards and ideals to produce a nightmarish system.” Langbein’s highly influential scholarship on modern comparative law has contended that European-style non-adversarial justice is fairer, more accurate, and more economical than Anglo-American procedures. And in 2006, his book, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, received the Coif Biennial Book Award as the outstanding American book on law for 2003-04.
Langbein was awarded the American Society for Legal History’s Sutherland Prize for his “pioneering work” in legal history. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the International Academy of Comparative Law, American College of Trust and Estate Counsel, Association international de droit judiciaire, and International Academy of Estate and Trust Law.
Langbein has complemented his scholarship by participating extensively in law reform. He has served continuously as a Uniform Law Commissioner under gubernatorial appointment since 1984. Langbein was also the reporter and drafter of the Uniform Prudent Investor Act (1994), which governs fiduciary investing in most American states.