Richard D. Freer

Robert Howell Hall Professor of Law

Richard D. Freer clerked for a federal district judge and a federal appellate judge before litigating with the Los Angeles firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. He joined the faculty in 1983 and has served as visiting professor at George Washington University and at Central European University in Budapest. The student body has named him Outstanding Professor seven times. The Black Law Students Association has named him Professor of the Year four times. The University recognized him with its Scholar/Teacher Award in 2008, and he is a recipient of the University’s highest teaching award, the Emory Williams Award for Excellence in Teaching. He also has received Emory Law’s triennial Ben F. Johnson Award for Faculty Excellence.

Areas of Specialty: Civil Procedure, Complex Litigation, and Business Associations.

Research and Scholarship: Professor Freer is author or co-author of 11 books, including his Treatise on Civil Procedure (2d ed. 2009), the widely-adopted Freer & Perdue casebook on Civil Procedure (5th ed. 2008) and a popular casebook on Business Structures (2d ed. 2007). He is the only academic to serve as contributing author to both of the standard multivolume treatises on federal jurisdiction and practice: Moore’s Federal Practice and Wright & Miller’s Federal Practice and Procedure. He has written widely-regarded articles in various areas of federal jurisdiction and procedure, and served as an adviser to the American Law Institute’s Federal Judicial Code Project. He is a national bar review lecturer on Civil Procedure, Federal Jurisdiction, and Corporations, and lectures annually to tens of thousands of bar candidates and law students. He served for six years on the University’s President’s Advisory Committee and was the University’s Vice Provost in 1991.

Education: BA, University of California, San Diego, 1975; JD, UCLA, 1978.