William Lloyd Prosser (March 15, 1898 – 1972) was the Dean of the

School of Law A law school (also known as a law centre or college of law) is an institution specializing in legal education, usually involved as part of a process for becoming a lawyer within a given jurisdiction. Law degrees Argentina In Argentina, ...

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant univ ...

from 1948 to 1961. Prosser authored several editions of ''Prosser on Torts'', universally recognized as the leading work on the subject of

tort law A tort is a civil wrong that causes a claimant to suffer loss or harm, resulting in legal liability for the person who commits the tortious act. Tort law can be contrasted with criminal law, which deals with criminal wrongs that are punishable ...

for a generation. It is still widely used today, now known as ''Prosser and Keeton on Torts'', 5th edition. Furthermore, in the 1950s, Dean Prosser became Reporter for the '' Second Restatement of Torts''.

Biography

After spending his first year at Harvard Law School, Prosser transferred to and received his

Juris Doctor The Juris Doctor (J.D. or JD), also known as Doctor of Jurisprudence (J.D., JD, D.Jur., or DJur), is a graduate-entry professional degree in law and one of several Doctor of Law degrees. The J.D. is the standard degree obtained to practice law ...

from the

University of Minnesota Law School The University of Minnesota Law School is the law school of the University of Minnesota, located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The school confers four law degrees: a Juris Doctor (J.D.), a Master of Laws (LL.M.), a Master of Science in Patent Law (M ...

. After a brief time in private practice at Dorsey, Colman, Barker, Scott & Barber (the modern-day Dorsey & Whitney), he became a professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School, where he wrote ''Prosser on Torts''. He taught there from 1931 until 1940, when he resigned to become the Minnesota counsel for the Roosevelt Administration's

Office of Price Administration The Office of Price Administration (OPA) was established within the Office for Emergency Management of the United States government by Executive Order 8875 on August 28, 1941. The functions of the OPA were originally to control money ( price con ...

. In 1943, he returned to private practice for another four years. In 1947, Prosser returned to Harvard Law School as a professor. The following year, Prosser became Dean of the School of Jurisprudence at UC Berkeley. Available through

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.Jessica Thompson
Minnesota's Legal Hall of Fame
''Law & Politics'', Accessed November 28, 2010. The unusual name of Berkeley's law school was a leftover from its beginnings as an undergraduate department, but had not been changed because of existing statutory language designating the Hastings College of Law as the University of California's "law department." After Prosser learned that UCLA had been able to get legislative approval for its own "school of law" (notwithstanding the Hastings statutory language), he decided that Berkeley could also get away with having its own school of law and set about getting the school renamed. In 1961, Prosser left Berkeley to teach at Hastings, where he remained until his death in 1972. In a small exhibit about the

Levering Act The Levering Act (Cal. Gov. Code § 3100-3109) was a law enacted by the U.S. state of California in 1950. It required state employees to subscribe to a loyalty oath that specifically disavowed radical beliefs. It was aimed in particular at employees ...

loyalty oath in the ground level of the Campanile at UC Berkeley, Prosser is quoted as saying, "If the authority exists to discharge a professor because he will not sign this oath on demand, then it exists to fire him because he will not sign an oath that he is not a Catholic, not a Mason, not a consumer of beer ... there is no place to stop."

Prosser and strict products liability

Prosser became closely associated with the doctrine of

strict liability In criminal and civil law, strict liability is a standard of liability under which a person is legally responsible for the consequences flowing from an activity even in the absence of fault or criminal intent on the part of the defendant. ...

for products injuries. His first edition of ''Prosser on Torts'' in 1941 argued that strict

products liability Product liability is the area of law in which manufacturers, distributors, suppliers, retailers, and others who make products available to the public are held responsible for the injuries those products cause. Although the word "product" has ...

was developing in American law, and predicted that it would be the law of the future. By the time his influential article ''The Assault on the Citadel (Strict Liability to the Consumer)'' was published in 1960, the

New Jersey Supreme Court The Supreme Court of New Jersey is the highest court in the U.S. state of New Jersey. In its current form, the Supreme Court of New Jersey is the final judicial authority on all cases in the state court system, including cases challenging th ...

fulfilled his prediction, holding in '' Henningsen v. Bloomfield Motors'' that manufacturers implicitly warrantied their products against personal injury to all users. As Reporter for the Second Restatement of Torts, he helped codify strict products liability in the Restatement's Section 402A. In the early 1940s, Prosser prepared the Comments and Notes to the predecessor of the

Uniform Commercial Code The Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), first published in 1952, is one of a number of Uniform Acts that have been established as law with the goal of harmonizing the laws of sales and other commercial transactions across the United States through U ...

: Commercial Code, Tentative Draft No. 1 – Article III. His work was limited to sections 1–51 of Article III, which focused primarily on commercial paper.Commercial Code Comments and Notes to Tentative Draft No. 1 – Article III, Introductory Note on p.5 (The American Law Institute, 1946)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Prosser, William Lloyd 20th-century American lawyers American legal writers American legal scholars Scholars of tort law Deans of UC Berkeley School of Law UC Berkeley School of Law faculty Harvard Law School faculty University of Minnesota Law School faculty University of Minnesota faculty University of Minnesota Law School alumni Harvard Law School alumni California lawyers Minnesota lawyers People from New Albany, Indiana 1898 births 1972 deaths 20th-century American academics