Aaron Twerski: Celebrated Tort Scholar and Teacher of Indelible Lessons
Professor Aaron Twerski is one of five professors retiring after this spring semester. To share a memory of or to send greetings to Professor Twerski, please send an email to communications@brooklaw.edu. He would love to hear from his former students and colleagues.
Professor Aaron Twerski is known among scholars and attorneys alike for his brilliant work in tort law, but he is equally celebrated by the generations of students who can still recite his colorful axioms and what they learned in his class, decades after graduating.
Now, as the Irwin and Jill Cohen Professor of Law retires at the end of the semester, Twerski reflected with pride on his accomplishments and the community he has enjoyed during his 38 years on the faculty. He first taught at Brooklyn Law School from 1986 to 2005 and rejoined in 2007 after serving as Dean and Professor of Law at Hofstra University School of Law for two years.
“I absolutely love the teaching, and my years at Brooklyn were really just marvelous: the students, the administration, my colleagues, I loved it all,” Twerski said. “I loved getting up in the morning and going to work.”
Roles in Major Lawsuits
After graduating from Marquette University Law School in 1965, Twerski joined the U.S. Department of Justice as a trial attorney at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. He brought the first Title VII employment discrimination case in Virginia, and one of the first public accommodation cases in South Carolina.
In 1967, Twerski went on to excel as a teaching fellow at Harvard Law School and took his first teaching position at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.
The next move was to the New York City area, where Twerski joined the faculty at Hofstra University School of Law and simultaneously played a crucial role in several landmark legal cases. He remains especially proud of his work as a member of the Plaintiffs Law Committee (1979–84) in litigation concerning the effects of the herbicide Agent Orange. The plaintiffs were Vietnam War veterans and their families, who, despite having little money for legal assistance, had filed a suit against deep-pocketed defendants, the U.S. government and seven major chemical companies that ultimately resulted in a settlement.
Another important case took place close to home. U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York tapped Twerski to serve as special master in the federal case involving more than 10,000 plaintiffs who suffered adverse health effects after being involved in cleanup efforts at the World Trade Center site following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Twerski enlisted his frequent co-author, Cornell Law Professor James Henderson Jr. to settle what the three men described in a paper as “the most complex mass tort case in the history of the United States.”
As part of that work, Twerski and Henderson created a database of 9/11 victims and the severity of their injuries that served as a model for a later case concerning exposure to tainted water at the Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, N.C.
A Prolific Scholar
Within academia, Twerski is well-known for his extensive scholarship. He has, over the course of his career, authored or co-authored 93 law review articles on torts and products liability law that together have been downloaded 31,640 times. His writing has covered the landscape of tort law and product liability—from examining the principles of the law of informed consent to the liability of digital platforms such as Amazon as product sellers.
He has also co-authored three casebooks: Products Liability: Problems and Process (with James A. Henderson, 10th ed.); Torts: Cases and Materials (with James A. Henderson) 6th edition; and Choice of Law: Cases and Materials for a Concise Course on Conflict of Laws (with BLS’s 1901 Distinguished Research Professor of Law Neil B. Cohen), 2nd Edition.
His most important written work, Twerski said, is the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law, Third, Torts: Products Liability for which ALI named him the R. Ammi Cutter Reporter honoring distinguished legal scholarship. The ALI is the leading independent organization in the United States producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and improve the law.
In April 2023, Twerski’s work was celebrated at a Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law Annual Symposium, titled “Professor Aaron Twerski and the Law of Torts: Duty, Design, and Conflicts,” and his work was written about by other scholars in a “Festschrift” volume of the Journal.
“We had scholars from all over the country who came in, and it was very, very special to me being recognized by these scholars,” Twerski said. “One joined us via Zoom, but the rest all came in person, and it was a day and a half of great discussion. But for me, it was also a recognition of all the work that I had done.”
Grounded in Faith
Deeply motivated throughout his life by the Orthodox Jewish faith in which he was raised, Twerski said that in his retirement he will study the Torah and his “first love,” the Talmud, a collection of writings that cover the full gamut of Jewish law and tradition.
As a child, Twerski grew up in a close-knit Orthodox Jewish community in Milwaukee where his father, who had migrated from Russia, was the chief rabbi and a magnetic presence in the community. “He had infinite love and compassion for people, and they were drawn to him. And so, he built a community,” Twerski told Brooklyn Law Notes in a 2023 profile. “My parents’ door was open to everyone from five o’clock in the morning till five o’clock the next morning… and the next. They had ancestors who were outstanding Jewish leaders in Russia and Poland, and they were raised to live for others. It motivated their lives. It was the air that we breathed.”
The professor continued the family tradition of supporting his community, now in Brooklyn, and said he will continue to do so in retirement. Twerski will also enjoy having more time to devote to his large, tight-knit family. He has nine children and many grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—and family members visit often. “And they come around the house, one day it’s one, one day it’s the other. They’re the greatest joy in my life,” he said.
Breaking Stereotypes in the Legal Profession
Twerski recently received the Jewish Media All-Star Award for breaking stereotypes in the legal profession and gave a speech describing how, despite being the highest- rated teaching fellow at Harvard, the head of the program told Twerski he was not receiving offers for a teaching position because of the way he looked.
Fortunately for his students and colleagues, his job search was successful. Months after that discussion, Duquesne University, a Jesuit school like his alma mater Marquette, phoned to invite him to fill a position.
“It’s where my teaching career started,” Twerski said. “But it almost didn’t happen.”
In addition to Hofstra and Duquesne, he was a visiting professor at Cornell, Boston University, and the University of Michigan law schools. “I broke every concept of what they thought an Orthodox Jew and a Hasidic Jew would look like,” Twerski said, to cheers from the audience at the awards ceremony. “I broke the stereotypes…When I walk in today, to Brooklyn Law School, where I am still teaching, I broke stereotypes.”
Generations of students at the Law School remember the unique way Twerski taught (Click here and scroll down to “The Twerski Effect”). There are tactics they deploy in their careers such as “his methodology for issue identification and reasoning.” They recall lessons on the “butterfly effect,” which relates to how a judge must get “butterflies in the stomach” before making a big decision and the “in-and-out-of-the-fog” metaphor he used to help students navigate the legal writing process.
In late April, Twerski taught his last Torts class. He will miss the students but looks forward to the free time now that he will no longer be preparing for classes.
“It wasn't a chore; it was a work of love. And I could not have asked for a better environment to work or for colleagues who were more supportive,” Twerski said.