Fleming Award in Torts Bestowed Upon Lewis Klar
University of Alberta Professor Lewis N. Klar is the 2016 recipient of the prestigious John G. Fleming Award in Torts, according to an announcement yesterday by UC Berkeley Law School. A giant in the world of Canadian tort law, Klar will deliver the fourth Fleming Lecture at Berkeley Law on Wednesday October 26, 2016 at 11:20 a.m. in room 105 of the law school.
John Fleming was the 20th century’s leading scholar of comparative tort law, as perhaps befitting someone who was born in Germany, educated in England, served as a law dean in Australia and spent the bulk of his illustrious career at Berkeley. Professor Fleming’s treatise on The Law of Torts, drawing on the common law of a wide range of countries, is currently in its 10th edition. Fleming served for many years as the editor-in-chief of the Berkeley-based American Journal of Comparative Law.
Upon Professor Fleming’s death in 1997, the Fleming prize was created in his honor to be awarded bi-annually to an international scholar in tort law. Professor Klar is the 10th winner of the prize. Previous recipients include law professors Harold Luntz of Melbourne, Guido Calebresi of Yale, Stephen Todd of New Zealand’s UC Law, Basil Markesinis of Univ. College London, Robert Rabin of Stanford, Mike Green of Wake Forest Univ., Bill Powers of Texas, Helmut Koziol of Univ. of Vienna and Judge Allen Linden of Canada. Linden will travel to Berkeley to present the Prize to Professor Klar.
More recently, owing to the generosity of the Fleming family and Joe and Cathy Feldman of Chicago, Berkeley Law created the Fleming Lecture, to be delivered by the Fleming Prize winner. Professor Klar’s lecture is titled “The Ebbs and Flows of Tort Law: Reflections on a Half Century of Tort Law.” The Fleming Lecture is open to the public.
Professor Klar served as Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta from 1997 to 2002. He was admitted to the Bar of the Province of Quebec in 1971 and the Law Society of Alberta in 2000. He was awarded a Queen’s Counsel in 2002, and received the Distinguished Service Award for his contribution to legal scholarship from the Law Society of Alberta and the Canadian Bar Association (Alberta) in 2005. In 2007, Professor Klar received the J. Gordin Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research from the University of Alberta. This is the university’s most senior and prestigious research award. In 2008, Professor Klar received the Hon. Tevie H. Miller Teaching Excellence Award from the Faculty of Law.
Professor Klar is the author of Tort Law, 5th edition, 2012, and a co-author of Canadian Tort Law: Cases, Notes & Materials, 14th edition, 2014. In recognition of Professor Klar’s contributions to tort law, a Special Edition of the Alberta Law Review has just been published in his honour. Professor Klar was a contributor to the 10th edition of Fleming’s The Law of Torts (2011) as well as to Torts Tomorrow: A Tribute to John Fleming (1998). Professor Klar is an elected member of the American Law Institute. His works have been cited hundreds of times by the courts in every province in Canada, including the Supreme Court of Canada.