Geoffrey C. Hazard, Jr.

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Geoffrey Cornell Hazard, Jr. (born September 18, 1929) is Trustee Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the Thomas E. Miller Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law. He is also Sterling Professor Emiritus of Law at Yale Law School.

Hazard graduated from Swarthmore College with a B.A. in 1953 and received his LL.B. in 1954 from Columbia Law School, where he was Reviews Editor of the Columbia Law Review.

From 1984 until 1999, Hazard served as Director of the American Law Institute (ALI). As Director Emeritus, he continues to serve on the institute's council.

Hazard is a leading expert in the fields of civil procedure and legal ethics. His treatise, Civil Procedure (5th ed. 2001, with Fleming James, Jr. and John Leubsdorf), is a mainstay of American legal education. He continues to write prodigiously including the ALI/UNIDROIT Principles of Transnational Civil Procedure which upon approval by the sponsoring organizations has become a model of civil procedure for international commercial disputes, and many articles, particularly on joinder, including class actions, and discovery. His casebook, Pleading and Procedure: State and Federal (9th ed. 2005, with Colin Tait, William A. Fletcher and Stephen Bundy), is widely used in American law schools. In professional ethics, his new book, Legal Ethics: A Comparative Study (with Angelo Dondi) compares ethics in the legal professions of modern industrialized countries. He is also author of The Law of Lawyering (3rd ed. 2000, with William Hodes, and, after 2007, Peter R. Jarvis), a treatise on legal ethics that is updated annually. He often acts as an expert witness in both fields.

Among Hazard's better-known students is current US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. Alito also worked as Hazard's research assistant when the latter taught at Yale.[1]