Profile

Richard Chused is a prolific scholar and an expert on copyright law, property law and its history, family law, and gender and law in American history. He joined the New York Law School faculty in 2008 after spending 35 years teaching and writing at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. In 2004–05, he received a Senior Scholar Fulbright Grant to teach at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. From 2009 to 2011, he served on a Peer Review Committee that made recommendations on grant applications for the Fulbright Program in the Middle East. Professor Chused also is a member of various history and legal history associations. He served on the Board of Governors of the Society of American Law Teachers for 12 years and as its webmaster for 10.

Professor Chused has published numerous books, articles, and teaching texts on property, copyright, family law, and the legal history of both gender and property law. His book Gendered Law in American History, written with Professor Wendy Williams, his teaching partner of many years at Georgetown University Law Center, is a path-breaking teaching and resource text on the myriad ways gender has been used and often abused as a baseline for regulatory authority since the founding days of the republic. In recent years, he also has published award-winning essays on cutting-edge areas of copyright law and its relationship to art history.

Among Professor Chused’s other writings are the definitive history of the famous landlord-tenant case Javins v. First National Realty Corporation; a history of Marini v. Ireland—the best known New Jersey landlord-tenant reform case; the third edition of his property textbook published by Carolina Academic Press; “Mt. Laurel: Hindsight is 20-20,” an article contending that the famous land-use case was in some ways wrongly decided; and Euclid’s Historical Imagery, a historical reappraisal of the racial and ethnic motivations underpinning the famous zoning case.

His wife, Elizabeth Langer, is an artist working in a variety of media, including oil and acrylic paint, collage, and printmaking. Their older son, Benjamin Chused, creates strategic marketing plans for Dell-EMC, Inc.; their younger son, Sam Langer, works in New York for an international public relations firm.