Richard Allen Epstein (born April 17, 1943) is an American legal scholar and professor of law renowned for his extensive writings on torts, contracts, property rights, law and economics, classical liberalism, and libertarianism. He holds the Laurence A. Tisch Professorship of Law at New York University School of Law (inaugural holder) and serves as Director of the Classical Liberal Institute, which he helped found in 2013. He is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law Emeritus and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Peter and Kirstin Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution since 2000, and was faculty at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law from 1968 to 1972. Epstein has received an honorary LL.D. and has appeared in discussions on his career as a legal scholar, the takings clause, state monopoly power, his property-driven theory of constitutional interpretation, the Coase theorem, and classical liberalism versus anarcho-capitalism.