Myriam Gilles

Former Fellow, 2005-2006
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law

Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, Brookdale Center, 55 Fifth Avenue (at 12th Street), New York, New York 10003
phone: 212-790-0344
Website
C.V.

While at LAPA
Myriam Gilles is a Professor of Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. She received an A.B. in History and Literature from Harvard College and a J.D. from Yale Law School. Her areas of interest include tort and litigation reform; class action practice; and civil rights and structural reform litigation. Her articles have appeared in the Columbia Law Journal, the California Law Review, and other scholarly journals. In 2004, she was a visiting professor at the University of Virginia Law School. While at Princeton, she will explore the concept of entrepreneurial litigation in contemporary American legal practice by considering the ways in which entrepreneurism influences substantive legal doctrine and procedure, effects the way lawyers are perceived by the public, provides a target for litigation reformers, and blurs the traditional lines between plaintiffs' and defendants' counsel.

Life after LAPA
Since LAPA, I have plunged back into the institutional demands of committee work and teaching (with some requisite whining). On the scholarship front, I've continued to ask some of the same questions that kept me busy during my fellowship year regarding plaintiffs' class action lawyers. In particular, I've begun a new work that examines the war on class actions -- the decades-long effort by legislators, lobbyists and business groups to condemn the class action as a tool of self-interested plaintiffs' lawyers -- and the relative success of this war, both in transforming public opinion about the meaning and legitimacy of class action practice, and in producing actual legislation and judicial policy at the federal and state level purporting to "regulate" class actions and the lawyers who bring them. Among other things, I am focusing my research on the Class Action Fairness Act of 2006 and the recent Second Circuit decision in In Re IPO Securities Litigation as examples of a radically changed post-war legal environment. My goal is to continue the discourse on how the inhabitants of this new environment -- plaintiffs' lawyers, defense counsel, judges, interest groups -- will adapt to these changes and whether the law might be better or worse for their efforts.

Publications
"Exploding The Class Action Agency Costs Myth: The Social Utility of Entrepreneurial Lawyers" (with Gary B. Friedman), 155 U. Penn. L. Rev. 103 (2006).

"Opting Out of Liability: The Forthcoming Near-Total Demise of the Modern Class Action," 104 Mich. L. Rev. 373 (2005).