Tom Baker, JD

Biography

Tom Baker is a highly regarded insurance expert, a leading scholar of insurance law and policy, and a devoted law teacher. His research explores insurance law, institutions, and markets using methods from history, economics, psychology and sociology. 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. Recent articles include “Regulating Robo Advice Across the Financial Services Industry,” which outlines a regulatory trajectory to address the automation of financial services advice, 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. Current research topics include cyber liability and insurance, long term care insurance, secondary insurance markets, and the empirical study of insurance litigation. Baker is the Reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law Liability Insurance and a co-founder of Picwell, a health data analytics company that provides advanced decision support tools to health insurance exchanges, insurers, and employers. Before joining the Penn Law faculty in 2008, Baker served for eleven years as the inaugural Connecticut Mutual Professor and Director of the Insurance Law Center at the University of Connecticut. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Baker clerked for Judge 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 the University of Miami Law School.