Tom Baker

Tom Baker is a highly regarded insurance expert, a leading scholar of insurance law and policy, and a devoted law teacher.

He is the Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law Liability Insurance and co-founder of Picwell, a health data analytics company (acquired by Jellyvision) that provides advanced decision support tools to health insurance exchanges, insurers, and employers. Baker created the widely cited COVID Coverage Litigation Tracker, which gathers data on state and federal lawsuits by businesses seeking coverage for business interruption losses stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Before joining the Law School faculty in 2008, Baker served for 11 years as the inaugural Connecticut Mutual Professor and Director of the Insurance Law Center at the University of Connecticut.  A graduate of Harvard Law, Baker clerked for the Honorable Juan R. Torruella of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, practiced with the law firm of Covington & Burling, served as Associate Counsel to the Independent Counsel Iran/Contra, and entered law teaching as an associate professor at University of Miami Law.

His research explores insurance law, institutions, and markets using methods from history, economics, psychology, and sociology. His scholarship advances our understanding of insurance as governance through studies that examine the historical development of insurance ideas and institutions and their impact on civil litigation, health care, crime, and corporate governance. 

His many books, articles, and reports address topics such as the impact of insurance on personal injury and securities litigation, health insurance reform, insurance underwriting and claims management, the historical development of insurance institutions, insurance company restructuring, and many aspects of insurance coverage. Current research topics include automated financial advice, litigation finance, mass torts, crime risks, and the empirical study of insurance litigation.

Recent articles include “The Government Behind Insurance Governance: Lessons for Ransomware,” which sets out a new framework for analyzing how governments help make insurance markets work, and “Uncertainty > Risk: Lessons for Legal Thought From the Insurance Runoff Market,” which argues for understanding insurance markets as centrally about managing uncertainty, not predictable risks.