Linda Mullenix, Morris & Rita Atlas Chair in Advocacy, will participate in a roundtable discussion at New York City’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law on September 12, 2011, on “The Lessons of 9/11 for Mass Torts.” The discussion will focus on the U.S. Congress-created September 11th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001 (VCF) and how it has helped shape our response to mass disaster and whether it provides a useful template for the future. Mullenix, an expert in the field of mass tort litigation, has written extensively about the VCF, as well as about similar victim compensation funds, including most recently an article in the Louisiana Law Review about the BP Gulf Coast Claims Facility, “Prometheus Unbound: The Gulf Coast Claims Facility as a Means for Resolving Mass Tort Claims–A Fund Too Far” (PDF).
Mullenix will speak as part of a panel of distinguished experts, including Sheila Birnbaum of Skadden Arps; Professor John Goldberg of Harvard Law School; Marc Moller of Kreindler & Kreindler; Roger Parloff of Fortune; Professor Robert Rabin of Stanford Law School, and the Honorable Jack Weinstein of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The event will open with an address by Kenneth Feinberg, the special master appointed by the president to implement the VCF. After the panel discussion, there will be a reception and showing of Out of the Ashes: 9/11, a documentary that examines the VCF by chronicling legal choices faced by 9/11 families.
Linda Mullenix, Morris & Rita Atlas Chair in Advocacy
On the following day, September 13, Mullenix will speak as part of a panel at an event sponsored by the New York City Bar, entitled “The Jurisprudence of Jack Weinstein.” The panel will be a retrospective on the career of one of the country’s most influential judges, Jack Weinstein, and help celebrate his ninetieth birthday. The panel will comment on Weinstein’s judicial work, and Weinstein will be present to respond. In addition to Mullenix, panelists include Professor Jack Coffee of Columbia Law School; Professor Kate Stith of Yale Law School; Denise Cote, federal judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York; and Professor Jeffrey Morris of the Touro Law Center, who recently wrote Leadership on the Federal Bench: The Craft and Activism of Jack Weinstein, published by Oxford University Press. Mullenix reviewed the book for publication for Oxford.
Mullenix holds the Rita and Morris Atlas Chair in Advocacy at the University of Texas School of Law, and from 1991 to 2001 was the Bernard J. Ward Centennial Professor of Law. She is the author or co-author of ten books, including Leading Cases in Civil Procedure; Mass Tort Litigation; Federal Courts in the Twenty-First Century; State Class Action Practice and Procedure; Restatement Third, The Law Governing Lawyers; Understanding Federal Courts; and Moore’s Federal Practice (2d and 3d editions). She teaches Federal Civil Procedure, Mass Tort Litigation, Current Issues In Class Action Litigation, Class Action Litigation In A Global Context, and State Class Action Procedure. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the City College of New York and holds an MA and PhD in political science from Columbia University. She received her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center and practiced in Washington, D.C. During 1989–90 she was a Supreme Court Fellow at the Federal Judicial Center. She has been a visiting professor at Harvard and Michigan law schools. In 2002 she was a scholar-in-residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. During spring 2007 she held the Fulbright Senior Distinguished Chair in Law, in Trento, Italy.