Robert L. Birmingham is an American academic and legal scholar, who specializes in admiralty law, federal courts, energy law, and law and philosophy. He is a professor of law at the University of Connecticut School of Law. He is best known for originating the theory of efficient breach of contract. Education In 1960, Birmingham earned an AB from the University of Pittsburgh. In 1963, he earned his JD at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. During law school, Birmingham distinguished himself as editor-in-chief of the University of Pittsburgh Law Review. While completing his third and final law school year, and also serving as law journal editor-in-chief, Birmingham was enrolled in the first year of a PhD program in economics. After law school, Birmingham traveled to New England, where he earned his LLM, from Harvard Law School (1965). Birmingham returned to the University of Pittsburgh where, in 1967, he completed his doctorate in economics, and then a PhD in philosophy in 1976. Career Birmingham's first teaching position was as visiting assistant professor of law at Ohio State University in 1967. From there he moved on and taught as assistant professor of law at Indiana University, Bloomington from 1967 to 1971. During the debate over the adoption of the proposed Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, extending the right to vote to persons over the age of 18, Birmingham came down firmly in favor of ratifying the amendment, noting that successive presidential and congressional combinations could otherwise raise or lower the voting age at will. Upon ascending to Associate Professor in 1971, Birmingham stayed for three additional years ending his time at Indiana in 1973. He returned as a visiting professor in 1978–1979, but the majority of the time between 1974 and 2007 has been spent lecturing on the campus of the University of Connecticut School of Law. As of 2020, he is the most tenured full professor on the UConn Law faculty. In 2007, Birmingham was required to take a leave of absence after showing a film clip to a class that featured an interview with a pimp followed by a scene of "scantily clad women in a sexually suggestive pose". It was later announced that he would return to teaching the following semester, but would not be teaching his usual feminist legal theory course. Work Birmingham approaches contracts and damage measures from a law and economics standpoint. The