Lloyd Bonfield

Professor of Law
Director, Center for International Law

Professor Bonfield is a legal historian and internationally minded law professor, who teaches in the areas of trusts and estates, property, European Union law, and legal history.

While still a law student, Professor Bonfield was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue his doctorate at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. After two years of study, he was elected to a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he undertook research and taught English Legal History and Criminal Law. During his time at Cambridge, he was also associated with the international-renowned Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. His Ph. D. thesis was immediately published by the Cambridge University Press, as Marriage Settlements, 1600-1740, and paperbound and hardcover versions remain in print thirty years later.

Prior to joining the New York Law School faculty in 2008, Professor Bonfield taught at Cornell Law School and thereafter Tulane Law School for twenty-five years, where he was the Thomas Andre Junior Professor of Law and Associate Dean for International Graduate Studies and International Relations. He has taught American law on regular basis for the University of Zurich, and at universities in Tokyo (Chou), Jerusalem (Hebrew University), Siena, and Strasbourg. This aspect of his teaching interest led to the publication in 2006 of American Law and the American Legal System (West’s Nutshell). 

 Most of Professor Bonfield’s scholarship is in the area of legal history. He has edited Continuity and Change, a journal of social history, demography and the law published by Cambridge University Press for a quarter century, and prior thereto founded Law and History Review (the journal of the American Society for Legal History) in 1980. His most recent book is Devising, Dying and Dispute: Probate Litigation in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2011). He is currently working on Peter King’s Common Pleas Reports for the Selden Society, London.

In 2000, Professor Bonfield was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a Sumter Marks Award. He was awarded a Fulbright teaching and research award for the academic year 2005–06.