Milan Conference on Class Action Settlements

Linda Mullenix spoke on American class action settlements at the international Conference on Comparative Collective or Class Action Settlements, sponsored by the Universita degli Studi di Milano, Italy,on September 25-26, 2008. The Conference on Collective Settlements, sponsored by the University of Milan, focused on legislation in 2007 that, for the first time, authorized class action litigation in Italy. Italy is the first nation in the European Union to pass such legislation, a significant development in European law. The conference brought together distinguished legal scholars from Europe and the United States to discuss how group and class actions are implemented in different legal systems. Papers produced for the conference were published by the University of Bologna. In addition to addressing settlements in class action litigation, Professor Mullenix also discussed class actions procedures, potential abuses of settlement classes, due process protections for class members, and the heightened scrutiny of class action settlements in the U.S. after the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005. With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Professor Mullenix was Scholar-in-Residence at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, in 2002. She was also the Fulbright Distinguished Senior Chair in Law at the University of Trento, Italy, in 2007, and she has maintained an ongoing relationship with the legal community in Italy. “The class action rule has been in the U.S. since 1938, so we have seventy years of experience,” Mullenix said. “There is no other country that has anything like that length of experience in state and federal courts. For other countries embarking on or formulating class actions there is much to be learned from the American experience, both positive concerning resolving class actions as well as negative in addressing problems and abuses.” Professor Mullenix recently published the second edition of her casebook on Mass Tort Litigation, which was the culmination of twelve years of research, and currently teaches both Mass Tort Litigation and Current Issues in Class Action Litigation at the University of Texas School of Law. Related link: Professor Linda S. Mullenix Media contact: Kirston Fortune, UT Law Communications Office, (512) 471-7330, or kfortune@law.utexas.edu