That answer, which Shapo has treasured since, could describe Shapo’s own brilliant legal career, one that has propelled the University of Miami double alumnus into national prominence as an authority on torts and products liability law.
He has lectured and written extensively on the subject, with the reviewer of one of his works, The Law of Products Liability, concluding that “rarely will the analysis of a products liability issue be thorough or complete without the special lumination afforded by studying what Marshall Shapo thinks about the subject.”
For his groundbreaking work in American injury law that has enabled the public to become more aware of the risks and benefits of products and activities, Shapo is receiving a Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, during the Law School’s Commencement ceremony on May 12.
The Frederic P. Vose Professor of Law at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, Shapo began studying products liability law early in his career. In another dimension of that research, he immersed himself in examining how government agencies regulate safety in a multitude of areas, from automobile design to cigarettes to drugs, and came to the realization that we are all experimental animals.
“Sometimes we know that we are ‘guinea pigs,’ for example when we are subjects of clinical research for which we sign consent forms,” Shapo once said. “Often, however, we do not know of that role and only find out about it if a product or activity injures us.”
Shapo developed that concept into three books, A Nation of Guinea Pigs (1979), Experimenting with the Consumer (2009), and The Experimental Society (2016), which explore the interactions of science and law.
A prolific writer, Shapo long ago stopped counting the number of books he has written and edited, because “it is so hard to judge, with multi-volume works, supplements and the like.” His 2003 book, Tort Law and Culture, has been described as providing “at least one good idea per dollar of its price for anyone who works to balance the scales of the civil justice system.”
His 2005 book, Compensation for Victims of Terror, brings his rich background in the law of injuries to a subject that has touched all of us since the September 11 attacks. His monograph, “A Representational Theory of Consumer Protection,” was published as an entire issue of the Virginia Law Review, and he was the principal author of the thousand-page volume “Towards a Jurisprudence of Injury: The Continuing Creation of Substantive Justice in American Tort Law,” a commentary written for the Special Committee on the Tort Liability System of the American Bar Association. His coursebook Tort and Injury Law synthesizes his approach to the subject developed over 53 years of teaching.
Shapo, who earned a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, and a Juris Doctor, magna cum laude, from the University of Miami, served as editor in chief of the University of Miami Law Review and, in 2005, received the School of Law’s Distinguished Alumnus Award. He earned a Master of Arts in History and a Doctor of Juridical Science from Harvard.
He has been a visiting fellow at Wolfson College at Oxford University and twice at Wolfson College, Cambridge University, a visiting professor at the Juristiches Seminar, University of Gottingen, and has lectured in Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Italy and Japan.
A recent recipient of the Association of American Law Schools’ William L. Prosser award for “outstanding contributions in scholarship, teaching and service” in the area of torts and compensation law, he has testified several times before Congressional committees.
