Professor Aaron Twerski receives prestigious William L. Prosser Award

January 11, 2016 Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Aaron Twerski. Photo courtesy of Brooklyn Law School.

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Aaron Twerski, the Irwin and Jill Cohen Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, has been honored with the prestigious William L. Prosser Award, given by the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) in recognition of outstanding contributions of law teachers in scholarship, teaching and service in torts and compensation systems. Professor Twerski, a preeminent authority on products liability, has been a faculty member at the law school for nearly 30 years. He was presented with the award on Jan. 8 at the annual AALS meeting in New York City.

“There is no one more deserving of this award than Aaron Twerski. His influential and prolific scholarship is well-known and admired not only by his colleagues in the academy, but by the judges, practitioners and students who also have been the beneficiaries of his wisdom and brilliant teaching,” said Brooklyn Law School Dean Nick Allard. “Professor Twerski is beloved and revered by generations of our students. It is a joy to read his teaching evaluations. Adjectives such as ‘brilliant,’ ‘passionate’ and, notably, ‘caring’ abound.”

Twerski was lauded in the award announcement for “his own scholarship, his contributions to multiple casebooks, his exemplary teaching and his generosity toward other scholars. Aaron Twerski has made outstanding contributions of the kind that the Prosser Award was designed to recognize.”

Twerski has received numerous honors over his long career. In June, he was among a group of eight individuals honored as Icons of Brooklyn Law School during a gala on Ellis Island. The American Bar Association’s Tort Trial & Insurance Practice Section has honored him with the Robert B. McKay Law Professor Award, which recognizes law professors who are committed to the advancement of justice, scholarship and the legal profession in the fields of tort and insurance law. He was co-reporter for the American Law Institute’s (ALI) Restatement of the Law (Third) Torts: Products Liability, and for his distinguished performance, the ALI named him the R. Ammi Cutter Reporter.

He has published dozens of law review articles on torts and products liability law. He also has authored with Cornell Law Professor James Henderson Jr. the 1990 article about warnings, “Doctrinal Collapse,” that appeared in the NYU Law Review, which cited the article in 2000 as one of the 25 most influential articles published by the NYU Law Review over the previous 75 years. He earned acclaim from the New York Law Journal for his article “Fixing Failure to Warn,” which appears in the latest issue of the Indiana Law Journal.

Twerski is the co-author of the leading textbook “Products Liability: Problems and Process (7th ed.)” as well as “Cases and Materials on Torts (3rd ed.).” In 2015, he co-authored a new text, “Choice of Law: Cases and Materials for a Concise Course on Conflict of Laws” with Professor Neil Cohen.

His expertise has been widely called upon by state and federal legislative bodies considering product liability and mass tort legislation, and he is a frequent lecturer to the practicing bar. He serves as special counsel to the law firm of Herzfeld and Rubin, and he was appointed as a special master in the federal 9/11 cases dealing with the injuries claimed by those involved in the cleanup of the World Trade Center site.