Ward Farnsworth

Ward Farnsworth (born 1967) is the dean of the University of Texas School of Law and holds the John Jeffers Research Chair in Law. He is the Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law Third, Torts: Liability for Economic Harm. He previously served as Legal Adviser to the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal in The Hague.

Farnsworth graduated from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut in 1989 (B.A.) and with high honors from the University of Chicago Law School in 1994 (J.D.), where he served on the law review and was Hinton moot court co-champion.

Immediately after law school, Farnsworth served as a law clerk for Judge Richard A. Posner on the Seventh Circuit and then clerked for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the United States Supreme Court.

Prior to beginning his tenure as dean at Texas, Farnsworth taught for 15 years at Boston University School of Law, and served several years as associate dean for academic affairs. At BU, he taught civil procedure, torts, contracts, and rhetoric. At Texas, he teaches analytical methods, a course that offers a survey of tools that are useful for analyzing and arguing about multiple areas of law, organized around ideas from economics, cognitive psychology, jurisprudence, and rhetoric.

He has received many awards over the years, including the University-wide United Methodist Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award in 2009. An author and researcher, he has published in multiple legal journals, coauthored Torts: Cases and Questions, and written The Legal Analyst: A Toolkit for Thinking about the Law, Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric, and two online volumes on chess.