Jeffrey W. Stempel Awarded Honorary Doctorate For Contributions to Insurance Law
Because of his International recognition as a leading scholar of insurance law, Professor Jeffrey Stempel was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor Honoris Causa from the Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Spain last November. “The ceremony was a much bigger thing than I anticipated, “said Professor Stempel, who delivered a talk at the event with a working title of Rediscovering Rawls to Repair Law, which he is considering turning into a larger piece. “It was a great occasion,” he shares, “and I felt like a guest of honor waving the UNLV flag overseas.”
Professor Stempel is also working on the 12th edition of Fundamentals of Pretrial Litigation with Professor Roger Haydock and Damien Riehl, a new co-author. “With Damien, we add a tech-savvy expert to bring the latest edition some enhancements, including incorporating AI in terms of thinking about research, motion, practice, and brief writing.”
Additionally, Professor Stempel and co-author Erik S. Knutsen from Queen’s University in Ontario are teaming up for the 6th edition of their case book Principles of Insurance Law. The frequent collaborators are also updating their treatise Stempel and Knutsen on Insurance Coverage with a 5th edition with what he calls “fairly significant revisions.”
He is also in what he describes as “the homestretch” of working with a cross-section of experts to submit a second volume of Principles of Reinsurance Contract Law, to be published later this year (Volume I was published in 2019). Within this collaboration, the project group is working pursuant to a grant from the science funds of Switzerland, Germany and Austria with the cooperation of UNIDROIT (the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law). The work focuses on updated doctrine of insurance and reinsurance for the business community.
Recently, Professor Stempel presented Ideology, Interest Groups, and the Future of American Law: Clues and Concerns from the American Experience at the Zurich Forum on Transnational Insurance Law Seminar on Insurance Soft Law. He refers to “soft law” as “things that are not mandatory statutes passed by Congress or state legislatures because a court or law-making body could adopt, reject, or ignore them.” He notes that “traditionally soft law such as American Law Institute Restatements were debated deliberatively by courts (or legislatures in the case of model statutes), but recent years have seen more outright political-cum-partisan lobbying for and against soft law,” something he describes as a “disturbing development.”