Richard Allen Epstein (born April 17, 1943) is an American legal scholar known for his writings on torts, contracts, property rights, law and economics, classical liberalism, and libertarianism.

He had wide-ranging academic interests and did not wish to select a single major, obtaining special permission from the university to pursue a self-selected program of study across sociology, philosophy, and mathematics.

[6] Epstein's undergraduate performance earned him a Kellett Fellowship, an award at Columbia that pays for two of each year's top graduates to spend two years in England studying at either Cambridge University or Oxford University; Epstein chose Oxford, where he studied jurisprudence at Oriel College.

Epstein taught at Chicago for 38 years, eventually holding the title of James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law.

In 2013, NYU Law established a new academic research center, the Classical Liberal Institute, and named Epstein its inaugural director.

[8] Since 2001, Epstein has served as the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a prominent American public policy think tank at Stanford University.

[12] Epstein became famous in the American legal community in 1985 with Harvard University Press's publication of his book Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain.

In the book, Epstein argued that the "Takings Clause" of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—which reads, "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation", and is traditionally viewed as a limit on the governmental power of eminent domain—gives constitutional protection to citizens' economic rights,[2] and so requires the government to be regarded the same as any other private entity in a property dispute.

[13] At the height of the HIV pandemic in 1988, Epstein argued that companies ought to be able to discriminate against "AIDS carriers" and that anti-discrimination laws were unfair to employers.

Furthermore, he argued that "[t]here is no reason to suppose that any public benefit obtained from having employers and their insurers care for AIDS victims will be at some level that matches the additional costs that are imposed."

Taking a decidedly skeptical approach, Epstein concluded that no new national narrative can be achieved "unless we engage in what I call American minimalism—a conscious reduction of the issues that we think are truly best handled as a nation and not better address by smaller subnational groups: states, local governments, and, most importantly, all sorts of small private organizations that are free to choose as they please in setting their own membership and mission.

[22] In a piece published on March 16, he argued that the word "pandemic" is not to be used lightly and that the virus should be allowed to run its course, predicting there would be 500 U.S. deaths.

[27] On April 6, when the death toll had already far surpassed his earlier predictions, he again revised that figure, with the "Correction & Addendum" section declaring under the inaccurate date stamp "March 24, 2020" that the "original erroneous estimate of 5,000 dead in the US [was] a number 10 times smaller than [he had] intended to state", implying that both "500" and "5,000" had been misprints for "50,000".

[29] In December 2020, when the death toll from COVID-19 in the U.S. was over 333,000, Politico named Epstein's predictions among "the most audacious, confident and spectacularly incorrect prognostications about the year".

[30] Epstein compared COVID-19 to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic and suggested that public health measures "are done better at the level of plants, hotels, restaurants, and schools than remotely by political leaders."

He argued that "the response of the state governors to the coronavirus outbreak has become far more dangerous than the disease itself", writing that the number of deaths had been exaggerated.

[31] His essays, containing a number of factual errors and misconceptions about the SARS-CoV-2 virus, circulated in conservative circles and in the Trump administration upon their publication.