Norman Silber

Norman I. Silber teaches and writes in the areas of consumer law, commercial law, legal history, and nonprofit corporations. His latest book is a two-volume combination of legal history, biography, and autobiographical memoir exploring twentieth century legal thought through biography is titled Outside In: The Oral History of Guido Calabresi; his earlier book With All Deliberate Speed: The Life of Philip Elman focused on the civil rights division of the Justice Department. His book A Corporate Form of Freedom: The Emergence of the Nonprofit Sector looks at the role of legal doctrine in the expansion of the nonprofit sector.  His book Test and Protest: The Influence of Consumers Union explores the history the consumer movement and consumer product testing. His articles have appeared in journals including Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, and the Northwestern Law Review.

Professor Silber is a past chair of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York Consumer Affairs Committee, and a past director of the American Council on Consumer Interests, and  has scripted a PBS television documentary about risk and consumer regulation. For more than a decade he served as a director of Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine. He is a past editor of Advancing The Consumer Interest: A Journal of Consumer Law, Policy and Research.

He is the Andrew M. Boas and Mark L. Claster Distinguished Professor of Law at the Maurice A. Deane School of Law, Hofstra University. Between 2010 and 2022 he was a Visiting Professor and Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School.

He joined Hofstra in 1989 after practicing with Patterson, Belknap and serving as a law clerk to Judge Leonard I. Garth of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He received his J.D. from Columbia Law School, where he was an editor of the Columbia Law Review, in 1986. Prior to entering law school, he taught history at Sarah Lawrence College and Yale University. For many years he was affiliated with the Columbia University Oral History Research Office.