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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Cool Hand Luke (talk | contribs) at 23:55, 29 August 2007 (moved Theodore H. Frank to Ted Frank over redirect: Moving it back per naming conventions. Useful for users to see the logs on this article. We can move to a parenthetical disambiguation later. See talk.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Theodore H. Frank (b. 1968) is an American lawyer and a "leading tort-reform advocate" in the United States. He is a fellow with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, and Director of its Liability Project. Frank has written and spoken on liability matters such as product liability, asbestos litigation, medical malpractice, and pharmaceuticals.

Frank has written articles for several publications, including the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, as well as several law reviews. He has acted as pundit for several news networks, including NPR, the BBC, and Fox News. He is on the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society's Litigation Practice Group and contributes regularly to several conservative legal weblogs.

Background and early career

Frank earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brandeis University in 1991. He authored a number of columns for his campus newspaper and several political magazines. With several friends, Frank also took over a failing left wing student magazine and turned it around into a centrist one. He was a member of the student senate and had supported a campaign to allow pork to be served on-campus at the Jewish university.

In 1994 Frank earned his Juris Doctor with high honors from the University of Chicago Law School. At Chicago he earned Order of the Coif and served on the law review. After clerking for Judge Frank H. Easterbrook of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Frank entered private practice as a litigator on class action tort cases at law firms Kirkland & Ellis, Irell & Manella, and O'Melveny & Myers. As part of his practice he defended a lawsuit filed by the ACLU to delay the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election, defended the Vioxx liability cases, and also served on the defense team of several antitrust and patent cases.

While at Chicago law school, he regularly posted to usenet groups. Along with the founder of Snopes.com, he was known as a "troll" on alt.folklore.urban, though at the time the term did not have the negative connotation it has today. He also delivered regular rebuttals to hard right and conspiracist legal arguments on alt.conspiracy.

Advocate of tort reform

Frank joined the AEI as a fellow in 2005, where he has a record of speaking and writing on matters of legal liability. Areas of interest and expertise include product liability, asbestos litigation, medical malpractice, and pharmaceuticals such as Vioxx. Frank's writing appears in law reviews, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and National Review Online. Appearances and interviews include NPR, BBC, C-SPAN, and Fox News. As head of AEI's Liability Project his opinions and analysis of liability litigation have been quoted in BusinessWeek and the New York Law Journal. Other duties include organising conferences, seminars, and monographs on litigation reform, in addition to private research and writing on the subject.

Frank, together with Walter Olson, contributes regularly to the conservative legal weblog Overlawyered. He has also contributed to PointofLaw.com, maintained by Olson and sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. He maintains his own blog, TedFrank.com, on legal issues and his latest media appearances. He also sits on the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society's Litigation Practice Group.

Recorded viewpoints

Frank has claimed that a proposal to allow homeowners to keep their homes indefinitely after foreclosure is problematic, and may have constitutional issues. Frank has been critical of Michael Moore, calling him and his film Sicko "misleading".

Frank is also critical of Misplaced Pages, as quoted by CBS News. "Misplaced Pages in general suffers from a severe bias; articles about controversial topics reward persistence over accuracy," Ted Frank wrote.

Frank has criticized lawyers who file but do not win obesity class action lawsuits. He has also criticized lawyers who seek deep pocket defendants regardless of culpability, claiming the Virginia Tech massacre might have been averted if authorities had not failed to intervene with the killer out of fear of litigation.

References

1. Peter Lattman (October 30, 2006). "Trial Lawyers Defend Themselves While Taking On Terrorism". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2007-08-25.
2. ^ Schaeffer, Evan (May 11, 2005}, An Interview with Ted Frank of Overlawyered.com, Legalunderground.com. Retrieved August 26, 2007.
3. Special to the New York Times (1988-05-28). "'Pigtown' at Brandeis U. Protests Food Policy". New York Times. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help) "Ted Frank, a member of the Brandeis student senate, said that a majority of students disagree. He said, 'The general feeling is that we're not forcing them to eat pork and they shouldn't be forcing us not to eat pork.'"
4. Listed as "Theodore Frank" on masthead for vols. 60-61. Frank wrote a student comment, "The Economic Interest Test and Collective Action Problems in Antitrust Tie-in Cases", 61 U. Chi. L. Rev. 639.
5. ^ "Who is this Ted Frank guy anyway?", TedFrank.com
6. ^ aei.org - official American Enterprise Institute biography
7. Cecil Adams (2000-05-14). "The Straight Dope". Retrieved 2007-08-26. To be fair, not all trolls are slimeballs. On some message boards, veteran posters with a mischievous bent occasionally go "newbie trolling.
8. See David Porter, Internet Culture (1997) at 48 ("two of the most notorious trollers... are two of the most consistent posters of serious research").
9. Berlet, Chip, When Hate Went Online.
10. Liability Project Scholars and Staff
11. Cell-Phone Contract Disputes Heat Up, Olga Kharif, Businessweek, August 20, 2007.
12. Observers Speculate Justices Could Rejoin Securities Issue, Tony Mauro, The New York Law Journal, August 21, 2007.
13. PointofLaw.com masthead
14. Dan Gainor, Liberal Economist Urges Government to Seize Private Homes, businessandmedia.org, 8/24/2007
15. "Sicko’s Box Office Numbers are Fuzzy, Too" by Ted Frank, American.com, Wednesday, August 8, 2007
16. "Stephen Colbert Sparks Wiki War", CBS News
17. Theodore H. Frank (2006). "A Taxonomy of Obesity Litigation". University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review. Retrieved 2007-08-26. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
18. Frank, Ted, (April 18, 2007), Evil Is Always With Us, WashingtonPost.com. Retrieved August 26, 2007.

External links

• TedFrank.com - personal website and blog
• aei.org - official American Enterprise Institute biography
• Overlawyered.com - Blog on the U.S. litigation system.
• Pointoflaw.com - web magazine sponsored by the Manhattan Institute on the U.S. litigation system.

• Living people
• 1968 births
• Jewish lawyers
• American legal writers
• American bloggers
• Brandeis University alumni
• University of Chicago alumni