Calabresi, Guido
CALABRESI, GUIDO
CALABRESI, GUIDO (1932– ), U.S. jurist and legal scholar. Calabresi was born in Milan, Italy. When he was six years old, he and his parents fled Fascist Italy under Mussolini and came to the United States. Calabresi's father was a cardiologist and a clinical professor at Yale University. His mother was a philosopher and literature scholar and chair of the Italian department at Albertus Magnus College (New Haven). Calabresi began his undergraduate course work at Yale in 1949. In 1953, he graduated first in his class, summa cum laude, earning a B.S. in analytical economics. From 1953 to 1955, on a Rhodes scholarship, he studied politics, philosophy, and economics at Magdalen College, Oxford University. In 1958, Calabresi graduated first in his class at Yale Law School. At Yale, he also earned the Order of the Coif and served as note editor of the Yale Law Journal. Additionally, Calabresi earned an M.A. from Oxford in 1959 and a M.A. (Hon.) from Yale in 1962.
Calabresi clerked for Justice Hugo L. Black, on the U.S. Supreme Court, from 1958 to 1959. He returned to Yale Law School in 1959 to begin his long and distinguished academic career. He was an assistant professor at Yale from 1959 to 1961. In 1962, he was made full professor, the youngest full professor in the history of Yale Law School. In 1985, Calabresi became dean of Yale Law School, and continued in this position until 1994, when he was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals. During his tenure as dean, Yale Law School began to be consistently ranked as the number one law school in the United States.
In his 35 years as a professor and scholar at Yale, Calabresi wrote more than 100 legal articles, lectured worldwide, and was awarded numerous honorary degrees. In May 1988, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University, and was given the same honor by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2004.
As a law scholar, Calabresi is credited for being one of the founders of legal philosophy now known as economic analysis of the law, and especially as it is applicable to tort law. The latter is exemplified by his now classic work, The Cost of Accidents: A Legal and Economic Analysis, published in 1970. Among his other books are Tragic Choices (with P. Bobbitt, 1978); A Common Law for the Age of Statutes (1982); and Ideals, Beliefs, Attitudes and the Law (1985). In 2002, Scribes, the American Society of Writers on Legal Subjects, recognized Calabresi's legal scholarship by bestowing upon him its Lifetime Achievement Award.
In 1994, Calabresi was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit by President Bill Clinton. While on the bench, he continued to teach intermittently at Yale and held the title of Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law and Professorial Lecturer in Law. Calabresi also served on the Advisory Committee for the Jewish Fund for Justice (jfj), founded in 1984. While Calabresi is a practicing Catholic, he proudly traces his lineage to the earliest Jewish community in Italy. He appears to be an interesting example of what the late Jewish American political scientist Daniel J. Elazar has called the permeability of the boundary line between Jew and non-Jew.
[Michael J. Bazyler (2nd ed.)]