Daniel Schwarcz

Professor Daniel Schwarcz is an award-winning teacher and scholar. His research principally focuses on insurance law and regulation, spanning a broad range of issues such as systemic risk, regulatory federalism, health insurance, and coverage litigation. A separate strand of Schwarcz's research explores the impact of Artificial Intelligence on legal education, the practice of law,  and consumer protection. 

Schwarcz's scholarship has received numerous accolades. In 2017, the American Law Institute awarded Schwarcz its highly selective Early Career Scholars Medal, which recognizes “outstanding law professors whose work is relevant to public policy and has the potential to influence improvements in the law relevant to the real world.” Schwarcz has also been awarded the Liberty Mutual Prize for penning an outstanding insurance law article and been recognized as one of the most cited legal scholars writing on tort or insurance topics. 

Schwarcz’s scholarship has been published in a wide range of leading law reviews and journals, including the University of Chicago Law Review, Virginia Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Southern California Law Review and Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. He is also a co-author of the leading insurance law casebook in the country, Insurance Law and Regulation (7th edition 2020) which has been used as the principal text in courses on insurance law in more than 100 American law schools. Media outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and National Public Radio have covered Schwarcz’s scholarship. He has testified to U.S. Congressional committees on more than a half-dozen occasions and regularly serves as an expert witness in insurance-oriented disputes.

Schwarcz has won the University of Minnesota Law School's Stanley V. Kinyon teaching award on three separate occasions since joining the law school, most recently in 2023.  In 2024, Schwarcz received the University of Minnesota's Award for Outstanding Contributions to Graduate and Professional Education. He teaches a broad range of classes at the law school, including torts, contracts, insurance law, health care regulation and finance, health insurance law, regulation of financial institutions, commercial law, introduction to law for undergraduates, law and artificial intelligence, and judicial opinion writing.

Schwarcz joined the University of Minnesota Law School faculty in 2007, after completing a Climenko Fellowship at Harvard Law School.  He has also taught as a visiting professor at Washington University School of Law, UCLA Law School, and Berkeley Law School.

Schwarcz earned his A.B., magna cum laude, from Amherst College and his J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School. While in law school, he was an articles editor for the Harvard Law Review and a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics. After law school, he clerked for Judge Sandra Lynch of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and practiced at the law firm Ropes & Gray, where he worked mainly on insurance law matters.