Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus holds the Coil Chair in Litigation at the University of California College of Law, San Francisco, where he has taught since 1988. Before that, he was on the faculty of the University of Illinois, and before that he was a practicing lawyer in San Francisco. He is the author of dozens of articles on procedure and related topics, many of them on comparative procedure topics. He is also the lead author of leading American casebooks on Civil Procedure (now in its 8th edition) and Complex Litigation (now in its 7th edition), and the author of four volumes of Federal Practice & Procedure, the leading multivolume treatise on US federal court procedure. Since 1996, he has served as a Reporter to the US Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Civil Rules, which drafts proposed changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. He is now the Chief Reporter to that committee. In that capacity, he has over the past quarter century been chief drafter to important changes in the rules governing American discovery and class-action practice. Most recently, he has also been chief drafter of a new rule for multidistrict litigation that may go into effect on Dec. 1, 2025. He has also been active in the International Association of Procedural Law, and served as Vice President North America and as a member of the Presidium from 2015 to 2023, when his term ran out. During that time, he was also on three occasions the President of the Jury to select the winner of the Cappelletti Prize.