Kenneth Abraham is one of the nation’s leading scholars and teachers in the fields of torts and insurance law. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council of the American Law Institute. He has been an advisor to the American Law Institute's Restatement of Torts (Third), was a co-author of the Institute's major study, Enterprise Responsibility for Personal Injury, and has served on many other boards and commissions concerned with tort law and insurance reform. He has been a consulting counsel and an expert witness in a variety of major insurance coverage cases, involving directors and officers liability, environmental cleanup liability, toxic tort, products liability and property insurance claims. He has also served as an arbitrator for the Dalkon Shield Claimants Trust, and resolved over 100 claims by women seeking damages for injuries caused by the Dalkon Shield intrauterine device, both in the United States and Europe.

In 2000 Abraham received the all-University of Virginia Outstanding Teacher Award, as well as the American Bar Association's Robert B. McKay Law Professor Award, given for outstanding contributions to tort and insurance law. In 2001 he was honored with a Distinguished Faculty Achievement Certificate from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, for "outstanding achievement in teaching, research, and public service.” Abraham has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and Case Western Reserve Law School. He taught for nine years at the University of Maryland Law School before coming to Virginia in 1983.

Abraham’s most recent book is The Liability Century: Tort Law and Insurance from the Progressive Era to 9/11 (2008). His casebook, Insurance Law and Regulation, now in its fifth edition, has been used as the principal text in courses on insurance law in more than 100 American law schools. His torts treatise, The Forms and Functions of Tort Law (3d ed. 2007), has become a basic text for first-year law students across the country.