Liebman received his B.A. from Yale University in 1962, graduating summa cum laude, and earned an M.A. in history from Cambridge University in 1964. He graduated magna cum laude in 1967 from Harvard Law School, where he was President of the Harvard Law Review.
Legal and Academic Career
After serving as a law clerk to Justice Byron White of the United States Supreme Court during the Court’s 1967 term, he spent two years working on transportation and community issues as an assistant to New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay. He joined the faculty of Harvard Law School in 1970 and remained there for 21 years, becoming a full professor in 1976 and serving as associate dean from 1981 to 1984. In 1991 he moved to Columbia as Dean of the law school and as the Lucy G. Moses Professor of Law. He stepped down as dean in 1996 and was named the William S. Beinecke Professor of Law; the following year he was appointed director of the Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law at Columbia.
On May 16, 1999, Liebman was named Director of the American Law Institute, the fifth person to hold the position, succeeding Geoffrey C. Hazard, Jr.. Under Liebman's leadership, the Institute experienced a significant expansion of its law reform work with the commencement of 18 new projects, including the first project in the Restatement Fourth series, The Restatement Fourth, The Foreign Relations Law of the United States. Works completed and published under Liebman’s stewardship include new Restatements of Agency, Property, Restitution and Unjust Enrichment, Torts: Apportionment, Torts: Liability for Physical and Emotional Harm, and Trusts, as well as Principles of the Law volumes on Aggregate Litigation, Family Dissolution, Intellectual Property, Software Contracts, Transnational Civil Procedure, and Transnational Insolvency. Also published were a proposed federal statute concerning recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments and 11 volumes on world trade law. A final draft of The Restatement Third, Employment Law was approved by the membership of the American Law Institute at its May 2014 Annual Meeting on the final day of Liebman's tenure as Director. It is expected to be published in early 2015.
Liebman's research and teaching interests include employment law, legal ethics, comparative United States–Japanese social-welfare law, property law, and telecommunications law. He is the author of A Concise Restatement of Property, and the coauthor of Decentralizing City Government, Property, The Social Responsibilities of Lawyers, Case Studies, and Employment Law.
