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Craig M. Lawson Professor of Law Emeritus

Professor Lawson joined the faculty in 1978. Born in 1948, he received his B.A. from Yale University in 1970 (French) and his J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of Law in 1974. At Hastings, he was Executive Editor of the Hastings Law Journal. He was admitted to the California State Bar in 1974 and practiced with a San Francisco law firm from 1974 to 1976. During the 1977-78 academic year, he was a teaching fellow at the University of Illinois College of Law at Urbana-Champaign.

Professor Lawson directs the first-year Legal Writing Program, coordinating the work in it, and lecturing. His main course is first-year Torts. He also teaches Advanced Torts, three electives in Health Law (Law and Medicine, Bioethics and the Law, the Law of Provider and Patient) and two advanced electives in legal writing (Style and Composition in Legal Writing, and Law & Literature). In 2011, Professor Lawson won the Alumni Council's Distinguished Faculty award.

Professor Lawson is an avid reader, especially in the humanities and the arts (literature - especially lyric poetry - and literary criticism, philosophy, art history and art criticism) and in medicine and the life sciences. He's a self-taught, amateur guitar picker (VERY amateur). When he has the time to couch potato, he favors movies over Monday-night football. He leads a relatively sedentary existence, although he will climb on a mountain bike, when he needs to get his blood moving. When he comes out of the closet, he admits to being an unreconstructed 1960s liberal. He is married to an actress, and has two grown children (one an actress in New York City; the other an out-of-work geologist in Southern California).

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