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Mass Tort Litigation Blog
Law Professor Blog Network

About

The Mass Tort Litigation Blog covers various areas related to mass torts, including torts, civil procedure, products liability, toxic torts, class actions, complex litigation, multidistrict litigation, legal ethics, and evidentiary standards involving scientific expert testimony. Edited by law professors, the Mass Tort Litigation Blog focuses on scholarship and academic conferences related to mass tort litigation, but also includes reference to current case developments and legislative efforts that may affect mass tort litigation.

Elizabeth Chamblee Burch
Elizabeth Chamblee Burch
Fuller E. Callaway Chair of Law, University of Georgia School of Law

Elizabeth Chamblee Burch joined the University of Georgia School of Law faculty in 2011. She was promoted to the rank of full professor in 2015 and served a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in 2017. After holding the Charles H. Kirbo Chair of Law for two years, she assumed the Fuller E. Callaway Chair of Law in 2019. She is the author of Mass Tort Deals: Backroom Bargaining in Multidistrict Litigation (Cambridge University Press 2019) and her teaching and research interests include civil procedure, class actions and mass torts.

Burch is an award-winning scholar whose groundbreaking work on multidistrict litigation and class actions won the American Law Institute’s Early Career Scholars Medal in 2015, the Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Professional Responsibility Scholarship in 2016 and the Mangano Dispute Resolution Advancement Award in 2019.

Burch has published over 40 articles and essays in respected journals such as the Columbia Law Review, New York University Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Boston University Law Review and George Washington Law Review, among others. She co-authors a casebook titled The Law of Class Actions and Other Aggregate Litigation with the late Richard A. Nagareda, Robert G. Bone, and Patrick Woolley.

Burch has delivered over 120 lectures at research institutions across the United States and abroad to diverse audiences–from law professors at their annual meeting to federal judges at their judicial retreats, lawyers and jurists at the American Law Institute and the American Bar Association, and psychologists at the International Congress on the Psychology of Law. She was elected as a member of the American Law Institute in 2013, and she is a frequent commentator in various international and national news media such as National Public Radio’s Marketplace, BBC World News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Atlantic, The Economist, Time, and The L.A. Times.

Before joining the School of Law’s faculty, she was an assistant professor at Florida State University College of Law, where she received the university-wide Graduate Teaching Award and was voted “Professor of the Year” by second- and third-year students. Burch began her academic career in 2006 at Cumberland School of Law, part of Samford University, where she received the Harvey S. Jackson Excellence in Teaching Award and the Lightfoot, Franklin & White Faculty Scholarship Award. In 2014, she received the School of Law’s John C. O’Byrne Memorial Award for Significant Contributions Furthering Student-Faculty Relations.

Before entering the legal academy, Burch worked as an associate at Holland & Knight in Atlanta, where she practiced in the area of complex litigation, including securities class actions. She has served as the mass torts subcommittee chair for the American Bar Association’s Class Action and Derivative Suits Committee, on the executive board for the Association of American Law Schools’ Scholarship Committee and as a co-editor of the Mass Tort Litigation Blog.

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Sergio Campos
Sergio Campos
Professor of Law and Faculty Director, LL.M. Program, Boston College Law School

Sergio J. Campos is Professor of Law at Boston College Law School and currently serves as the Faculty Director of LLM and Global Programs. His research and teaching interests include civil procedure, federal courts, and comparative law, with a special focus on complex litigation. Before joining BC Law, he served on the faculty of the University of Miami School of Law, where he was director of the SJD Program and a co-director of the Seminario en Latinoamérica de Teoría Constitucional y Política (SELA), a consortium of law schools in the U.S., Latin America, the Caribbean, and Spain focused on hemispheric legal scholarship. He clerked for the Honorable Juan R. Torruella of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and the Honorable Patti B. Saris of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He received his A.B. from Harvard College and his JD from Yale Law School.

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Howard Erichson
Howard Erichson
Maria L. Marcus Distinguished Research Scholar and Professor of Law, Fordham University School of Law

Howard Erichson teaches Civil Procedure, Complex Litigation, Professional Responsibility, and Torts. His research explores the U.S. litigation process, particularly the problem of resolving mass disputes. He is the past chair of the Civil Procedure Section of the Association of American Law Schools and was an Advisor to the American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation.

He is co-author of the casebook Civil Procedure (Aspen 2d ed. 2024), co-author of Complex Litigation: Cases & Materials on Advanced Civil Procedure (West 7th ed. 2021), and author of the book Inside Civil Procedure (3d ed. 2017). His articles have appeared in the Cornell Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Michigan Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and many other leading publications. Professor Erichson graduated from Harvard University and from New York University School of Law, where he was editor-in-chief of the Law Review.

After law school, he clerked for the New Jersey Supreme Court and for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and he practiced as a litigator with Cleary Gottlieb Steen and Hamilton in New York City. In 1995, he joined the faculty of Seton Hall Law School, where he was elected Professor of the Year and was named the John J. Gibbons Professor of Law. He joined the Fordham Law School faculty as Professor of Law in 2008, and was named the Maria L. Marcus Distinguished Research Scholar in 2023. He was elected Fordham Law School’s Teacher of the Year in 2012 and in 2023.

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Alexandra Lahav
Alexandra Lahav
Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Professor of Law, Cornell Law School

Alexandra D. Lahav is a nationally recognized expert on the civil justice system, complex litigation, and tort law. She studies doctrine from an institutional approach, and is particularly interested in methods for analyzing litigation risk and the history of products liability litigation. She teaches civil procedure, torts, and complex litigation and related subjects.

Professor Lahav is the author of an award-winning book, In Praise of Litigation (Oxford 2017). She is also the new author of volume 11A of the Wright & Miller Federal Practice and Procedure treatise, and co-author of a popular casebook on civil procedure. She has written over thirty articles on class actions, multidistrict litigation and tort law, many of which have been cited by courts and in treatises.

She is a member of the American Law Institute and in 2019-2020 she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She has also been a visiting professor at Columbia, Harvard, Tel Aviv, and Yale Law schools.

Prior to coming to Cornell, Professor Lahav held the Ellen Ash Peters Chair at the University of Connecticut School of Law, where she won the Perry A. Zirkel Distinguished Teaching Award in 2019. Before joining the legal academy, she was a litigator at a small civil rights firm in New York City and law clerk to Justice Alan Handler of the New Jersey Supreme Court.

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Byron Stier
Byron Stier
Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives, Professor of Law, and Director of Civil Litigation and Advocacy Concentration, Southwestern Law School

Byron Stier is a recognized expert in mass tort litigation.  He has spoken at, or served as moderator for, more than thirty scholarly presentations or panels around the country and the world.  In addition, in conjunction with the Southwestern Law Review, he has co-chaired three symposia regarding asbestos litigation; science, technology, and innovation in torts; and the Restatement (Third) of Torts.  His scholarship, which includes more than a dozen articles and book chapters, has been cited by federal and state courts, the American Law Institute, American Bar Association, Federal Judicial Center, and legal treatises. Associate Dean Stier was named Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives at Southwestern in 2016 and Director of the J.D. Concentration in Civil Litigation and Advocacy in 2020.  He previously served as Associate Dean for Research from 2015 to 2016 and Co-Director of the Summer Law Program in Vancouver from 2013 to 2014.  He was named the 2009 Irving D. and Florence Rosenberg Professor of Law in recognition of his outstanding service, teaching, and scholarship.

Associate Dean Stier has been actively involved in service to professional groups.  He has served as Chair, Chair-Elect, Secretary, Treasurer, and member of the Executive Committee of the Section on Litigation of the Association of American Law Schools.  In addition, he has served as Co-President, Vice President, Speaker Chair, and Board Member of the Harvard Law School Association of Los Angeles, and Member of the Council of the worldwide Harvard Law School Association. Moreover, he has served as Liaison of the ABA Section of International Law to the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar and as Vice Chair of the International Ethics Committee of the ABA Section of International Law. He has also been named a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation for outstanding dedication to the highest principles of the legal profession and to the welfare of one’s community.

Associate Dean Stier began his legal career in 1996 at Jones Day in New York.  During his five years with the firm, he primarily handled cases involving products liability litigation and served on a lead counsel team representing the tobacco industry in numerous proposed class-action lawsuits across the country.  In 2001, he joined Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP in the firm’s mass torts group, where he coordinated scientific evidence in a federal multidistrict litigation concerning cough-cold medications and appetite suppressants.  He left private practice in 2003 to enter academia as a Freedman Fellow and Lecturer in Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia.  In 2005, he joined the Southwestern faculty, where he has taught courses on Torts, Mass Tort Litigation, Legal Profession, Global Tort Litigation, Civil Procedure II, and Products Liability.

Associate Dean Stier has been quoted on issues related to mass tort litigation and legal education in major newspaper and news services, including the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News, Houston Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Reuters, Forbes, National Law Journal, Los Angeles Daily News, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Legal Intelligencer, and Inside Higher Ed, as well as All Things Considered on National Public Radio (NPR). In addition, he serves as editor of the Mass Tort Litigation Blog, which has received more than 935,000 page views globally since he founded it in 2006 and which includes as co-editors several leading mass tort litigation scholars from across the country.

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