Elizabeth Chamblee Burch
​Elizabeth Chamblee Burch is a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law where she holds the Fuller E. Callaway Chair of Law. Her teaching and research interests include mass torts, class actions, and civil procedure.
She has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and won the American Law Institute’s Early Career Scholars Medal in 2015 for her scholarship’s potential to improve the law governing class actions and multidistrict litigation. She has also won the Fred. C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for professional responsibility scholarship and the Mangano Dispute Resolution Advancement Award for groundbreaking scholarship on multidistrict litigation.
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Mass Tort Deals builds on and synthesizes a decade of Burch’s past scholarship, which has garnered widespread attention and won accolades for its focus on ethical issues. Her articles and essays are available for download here.
Scholarship
Her recent scholarship includes Against Bankruptcy: Public Litigation Values Verses the Endless Quest for Global Peace in Mass Litigation, Yale Law Review Forum (2024) (with Abbe R. Gluck & Adam S. Zimmerman, as well two articles that examine how plaintiffs in mass torts feel about the justice system, Perceptions of Justice in Multidistrict Litigation: Voices from the Crowd, Cornell Law Review (2022) (with Margaret S. Williams) and MDL for the People, Iowa Law Review (2023) (with Margaret S. Williams. Her prior work, Monopolies in Multidistrict Litigation, Vanderbilt Law Review (2017), and Repeat Players in Multidistrict Litigation, Cornell Law Review (2017) (with Margaret S. Williams), introduced data on repeat player attorneys, connected those players to the deals they designed, and illustrated how insiders may profit from the current system. Other articles such as Litigating Together: Social, Moral, and Legal Obligations, Boston University Law Review (2011), Disaggregating, Washington University Law Review (2013), and Procedural Justice in Nonclass Aggregation, Wake Forest Law Review (2009), highlight mass-tort plaintiffs’ relationship with the justice system and the dilemmas they face in a system that affords them a jury trial in name only.
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Burch has published over 40 articles and essays and co-authors a leading casebook on complex litigation titled The Law of Class Actions and Other Aggregate Litigation with the late Richard A. Nagareda, Robert G. Bone, and Patrick Woolley. In 2013, she was elected as a member of the American Law Institute.
She has delivered over 130 lectures at research institutions across the United States to an array of 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.
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Media
Elizabeth Burch interacts regularly with the popular press to help explain how the judicial system works in high-profile mass torts like opioids, RoundUp, mesh, and talcum powder. Burch’s academic work and commentary have been featured on National Public Radio’s Marketplace, and in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes, Bloomberg, The L.A. Times, Reuters, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, The ABA Journal, The Miami Herald, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, among others.
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Elizabeth Burch teaches complex litigation, mass torts, civil procedure, torts, and a class on multidistrict litigation strategy with a sitting transferee judge. In 2014, Burch received the John C. O’Byrne Memorial Award for furthering student-faculty relations at the University of Georgia. Before joining Georgia’s faculty in 2011, Burch 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.
She began her academic career in 2006 at Cumberland School of Law where she received the Harvey S. Jackson Excellence in Teaching Award and the Lightfoot, Franklin & White Faculty Scholarship Award. Before entering the legal academy, Burch worked as an associate at Holland & Knight LLP in Atlanta, where she practiced in the area of complex litigation, including securities class actions.
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