Congratulations to Mark Geistfeld, named the 2027 Prosser Award honoree by the AALS Torts & Compensation Systems Section!
Mark Geistfeld is the Sheila Lubetsky Birnbaum Professor of Civil Litigation at New York University School of Law, where he has been a member of the full-time faculty since 1992. He was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in 2014.
Geistfeld received his JD from Columbia University, after having served as editor-in-chief of the Columbia Law Review. He also received a PhD in economics from Columbia, with distinction, and an MA in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. His primary teaching areas are torts, products liability, and insurance. He has also taught law and economics.
Geistfeld’s research has extensively addressed the common-law rules governing the prevention of and compensation for physical harms, with a current focus on tort liability for harms caused by artificial intelligence. He is the Reporter for the American Law Institute’s project, Principles of the Law, Civil Liability for Artificial Intelligence, which is developing a comprehensive framework of liability rules for AI-caused harms. His scholarship in this area includes the co-authored book Civil Liability for Artificial Intelligence and Software (De Gruyter 2022); a comparative law study on civil liability for artificial intelligence commissioned by the European Commission; and a series of articles addressing how negligence and strict products liability apply to AI systems, including “Grounding the Tort Divide Between Products and Services for AI Systems,” 102 New York University Law Review (forthcoming 2027), and “Recovering Strict Products Liability for the Age of AI,” 62 Wake Forest Law Review (forthcoming 2027). This body of work builds on his longstanding analysis of how emerging technologies interact with tort liability and insurance, including “A Roadmap for Autonomous Vehicles: State Tort Liability, Automobile Insurance, and Federal Safety Regulation,” 105 California Law Review 1611 (2017), and his service as Reporter for the Uniform Law Commission’s Automated Technology Liability Special Committee. He also serves as an adviser to the European Law Institute’s study on AI liability.
Geistfeld has authored or co-authored five books along with over 50 articles and book chapters, often showing how difficult doctrinal issues can be resolved by systematic reliance on the underlying legal principles. In Product Liability Law in the Age of AI (Aspen Pub., 3d ed. 2025) and Principles of Products Liability (Foundation Press, 3d ed. 2020), he shows why the two dominant conceptions of products liability are not conflicting, as has been commonly assumed, but instead work together in a complementary fashion that persuasively explains the primary doctrines while resolving various issues that have perplexed the courts. In Tort Law: The Essentials (Aspen Pub. 2008) and ensuing articles, including “Tort Law in a World of Scarce Compensatory Resources,” 124 Michigan Law Review 59 (2025), he explains the important doctrines of tort law by reference to a compensatory tort right that unifies the primary liability functions of deterrence and compensation.
Before joining the NYU Law faculty, Geistfeld spent a year as a litigation associate in the New York office of Dewey Ballantine, another year as a law clerk for Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and then another year as a litigation associate in the New York office of Simpson Thacher. He continues to stay involved in litigation practice, having served as an expert witness or legal consultant in a number of tort and insurance cases. He is a senior editor of the Journal of Tort Law and often serves as a referee for peer-reviewed scholarly journals, university presses, and governmental funding agencies.
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