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Arthur Miller, New York University School of Law
Arthur R. Miller LL.B., CBE University Professor, NYU, School of Law, Chairman NYU Sports & Society Program, formerly Bruce Bromley Professor, Harvard Law School (1971 to 2007); faculty, Universities of Minnesota and Michigan. Undergraduate Degree, University of Rochester; J.D., Harvard Law School; Former Legal Editor, ABC’s Good Morning America; Host, Miller’s Court and several other TV shows; Emmy recipient for moderating The Constitution: That Delicate Balance. An author of numerous works, notably Wright & Miller, Federal Practice & Procedure; and on copyright and privacy issues. Professor Miller has argued numerous appeals particularly in the federal courts. Miller’s numerous awards include eight honorary doctorates, three ABA Gavel Awards and a Special Gavel Award for promoting public understanding of the law. He was honored by Queen Elizabeth II for his charitable and media work who named him a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Robin Effron, Brooklyn Law School
Professor Effron teaches civil procedure, litigation, and international business law courses. Her articles on procedure and federal courts have appeared in the Georgetown Law Journal, the Alabama Law Review, the William & Mary Law Review, the Wake Forest Law Review, and the Boston University Law Review, and has been cited by several state and federal courts. She is a regular presenter and commentator at civil procedure and litigation conferences and symposia, and her work has been selected for presentation at national events such as the AALS Annual Meeting (Civil Procedure Section), the Annual Civil Procedure Workshop, and Vanderbilt Law School’s Branstetter Workshop.
Conversant in German, she spent an academic year in Germany as a fellow in the D.A.A.D. Program for International Lawyers and worked with attorneys in the legal department of a large investment bank to research questions of German and U.S. law. At Brooklyn Law School, she serves as Co-Director for the Dennis J. Block Center for the Study of International Business Law. She is an avid writer, penning op-eds for various publications. Professor Effron also edits the Civil Procedure and Federal Courts Blog for the Law Professors Blog Network.
Prior to joining Brooklyn Law School’s faculty, Professor Effron served as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School. She also served as a law clerk to Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. In law school, she was articles editor on the NYU Law Review.
Richard Freer, Emory University
Richard D. Freer is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University. He is author or co-author of seventeen books, and serves as contributing author to both of the standard multivolume treatises on federal jurisdiction and practice: Moore’s Federal Practice and Wright & Miller’s Federal Practice and Procedure. His articles have appeared in leading journals, including NYU Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Duke Law Journal, and the Texas Law Review. He is a life member of the American Law Institute and an academic fellow of the Pound Institute for Justice. He is a national bar review lecturer for BARBRI on Civil Procedure and Corporations. He serves on the UC San Diego Athletics Advisory Board.
Professor Freer clerked for a federal district judge and a federal appellate judge before litigating with Gibson Dunn in Los Angeles. Graduating classes at Emory Law have named him Most Outstanding Professor ten times. He is a recipient of the university’s highest teaching award as well as the university’s Scholar/Teacher Award. He has served as a visiting professor at George Washington University, Central European University in Budapest, Moscow State University in Russia, the University of Warsaw in Poland, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.
Maggie Gardner, Cornell Law School
Maggie Gardner is an associate professor of law at Cornell Law School. A scholar of civil procedure and international law, her scholarship on transnational litigation and transnational regulation has been published in the Virginia Law Review, the NYU Law Review, Stanford Law Review, the Harvard International Law Journal, and the Journal of International Criminal Justice, among others. Prior to joining the Cornell faculty, Professor Gardner taught as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. Before entering academia, she practiced as a litigation and appellate associate with WilmerHale LLP in Washington, D.C. and clerked for Judge Sandra L. Lynch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and Judge Michael H. Simon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon. She also completed a year-long fellowship with the Appeals Chamber of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon under the direction of President Antonio Cassese.
Alexandra Lahav, University of Connecticut School of Law
Alexandra D. Lahav is the Ellen Ash Peters Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law. She is a nationally recognized expert on class actions, the civil justice system and tort law. She teaches civil procedure, torts, complex litigation, professional responsibility, and related subjects. Her book, In Praise of Litigation (Oxford 2017), won the Pound Civil Justice Scholarship Award and received an Honorable Mention in the ABA Silver Gavel Award. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2019-2020) and has been a visiting professor at Columbia, Harvard, and Yale law schools.
Alan Morrison, George Washington University Law School
Alan B. Morrison is the Lerner Family Associate Dean at the George Washington University Law School where he teaches civil procedure and constitutional law. He is also co-director of the James F. Humphreys Center for Complex Litigation at the Law School. For most of his career, he worked at the Public Citizen Litigation Group, which he co-founded with Ralph Nader in 1972 and headed for more than 25 years. He has argued 20 cases in the Supreme Court and regularly files amicus briefs, including most relevant for this symposium in a state court personal jurisdiction case in the Supreme Court (Ford Motor Co v. Bandemar) and in a personal jurisdiction case in the Fifth Circuit dealing with the reach of FRCP 4(k)(2) (Douglass v. Nippon Yusen). Mr. Morrison has previously taught at Harvard, NYU, Stanford, Hawaii, and American law schools, was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, and was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy between college at Yale and law school at Harvard.
Max is a judicial law clerk for a federal judge. He graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center in 2020, where he won the first-year Beaudry Moot Court Competition and served as executive articles editor for The Georgetown Law Journal. Previously, he worked at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the New York Attorney General’s Office.
Ben Spencer, William & Mary Law School
A. Benjamin Spencer, a nationally recognized scholar of civil procedure and federal jurisdiction, became dean of William & Mary Law School on July 1, 2020. He is William & Mary’s first Black dean of any school at the university.
Dean Spencer is the author of multiple volumes of the renowned Wright & Miller Federal Practice & Procedure treatise, in addition to numerous articles published in journals including the Michigan Law Review and University of Chicago Law Review. He is one of the nation’s most-cited civil procedure scholars, with a widely used civil procedure casebook, as well as a member of the U.S. Army Reserve Judge Advocate General’s Corps, serving in its Government Appellate Division as a captain. In 2017, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts appointed him to the U.S. Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Civil Rules.
One of Dean Spencer’s first acts in his new position was unveiling “Why We Can’t Wait – An Agenda for Equity and Justice.” This twelve-point plan of action includes, among other initiatives, creation of a university-wide Center for Racial & Social Justice, establishing a Community Law Clinic, and providing need-based scholarships.
Deepak Gupta, Gupta Wessler PLLC
Deepak Gupta is the founder of Gupta Wessler PLLC, a public-interest law firm that acts as a counterweight to the corporate dominance of the Supreme Court and appellate bar. Deepak has focused his two-decade legal career on ensuring access to justice for people-particularly for consumers, workers, and communities injured by corporate or governmental wrongdoing. In the current Supreme Court term, Deepak argued two consolidated cases about the Fourteenth Amendment’s limits on access to court for people injured by out-of-state corporations. In 2009, he was invited by the Supreme Court to argue in support of a judgment left undefended by the Solicitor General-the first Asian-American to receive an appointment to argue, and one of only two advocates selected in decades who did not clerk for a Justice. Deepak has been a leading voice in the public debate over forced arbitration and the need for effective protections for consumers and workers, testifying on those issues multiple times before the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Deepak also teaches at Harvard Law School, where he is a Lecturer on Law and was previously a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow. Before founding the firm, he helped launch the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as the first appellate lawyer hired under Elizabeth Warren’s leadership, and worked for seven years as an attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group, where he founded and directed the Consumer Justice Project.
Sean Marotta is a partner with Hogan Lovells’ Supreme Court and Appellate Practice group. He has argued at the Supreme Court and in state and federal courts across the country. Sean has also briefed cases in the Supreme Court, federal courts of appeals, and state intermediate and courts of last resort. As national personal jurisdiction counsel for Ford Motor Company, Sean argued the consolidated Ford v. Montana Eighth Judicial District Court and Ford v. Bandemer cases at the Supreme Court. Sean also briefed the landmark Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court case. And Sean has argued personal-jurisdiction issues in four state high courts for Ford, including specific-jurisdiction and consent-by-registration issues that have arisen following Daimler and Bristol-Myers Squibb. Sean is a graduate of the William & Mary Law School and clerked for the Honorable Jane Grall of the New Jersey Appellate Division after graduating law school.
Diandra (“Fu”) Debrose Zimmerman, Grant & Eisenhofer
Diandra (“Fu”) Debrosse Zimmermann is a director at Grant & Eisenhofer focusing her practice on the representation of individuals and public entities in complex litigation, including pharmaceutical, medical device, data breach, environmental contamination, sexual assault and civil rights litigation. She co-chairs the civil rights practice group, is active in the PPI MDL litigation, represents municipalities in environmental litigation, represents businesses wrongfully denied coverage due to losses from COVID-19, and serves on the PSC of the Smith & Nephew Hip MDL, among many other matters. Fu routinely seeks to advance justice on behalf of individuals, government entities and small businesses without hesitation.
Prior to joining G&E, Fu was a principal at an Alabama-based law firm where she represented over fifty cities and counties against pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors in the Opiate MDL. Over her career, she has successfully litigated mass tort, class action, product liability, discrimination, and civil sexual assault claims. She serves on the Board of Governors for AAJ, the Board of Governors of the Southern Trial Lawyers Association, and is a current member of the Board of Bar Commissioners and the Executive Council for the Alabama State Bar. She is also an advisory council member of STREAM, a community based organization dedicated to encouraging students from under-served communities to explore their passion for science, technology, reading, engineering, arts and mathematics.
Among many other accolades, Fu has been recognized by National Trail lawyers in the “Top 40 Under 40”, named to the National Academy of Personal Injury Lawyers, recognized as a SuperLawyer, and recognized in the list of Alabama’s Top 100 High Stakes Litigators. Fu’s firm, Grant & Eisenhofer, is recognized as one of the “Most Feared Plaintiff’s Firms” by Law360, and among the “50 Leading Plaintiffs Firms in America” by the National Law Journal.
Gregory Cook, Balch & Bingham LLP
Gregory C. Cook is chair of the Financial Services Litigation Practice Group at Balch & Bingham, L.L.P where he has practiced since 1991 and is a candidate for the Alabama Supreme Court for 2022. His practice centers on complex commercial litigation. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School (1991) where he served as the executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. He is the author of the Alabama Rules of Civil Procedure Annotated (Thomson Reuters, Fifth Edition) and serves as a member of the Alabama Supreme Court Standing Committee on the Rules of Civil Procedure. Mr. Cook is the editor and co-author of two books published by the American Bar Association (Class Action Strategy and Practice Guide (2018) and The Class Action Fairness Act: Law and Strategy (2013)). He has been recognized as a BTI Client Service All-Star, and is listed by Benchmark as a Litigation Star and in Best Lawyers in Mass Tort Litigation/Class Actions, has been rated “AV” by Martindale Hubbell and was selected by Super Lawyers in Business Litigation for the Mid-South. He is a member of the Texas and Alabama bars. He has held numerous positions with the ABA and currently serves as a member of the governing Council for the ABA Section of Litigation and has held numerous positions with the Birmingham and Alabama bars. He is a Life Fellow in the ABA and the Birmingham Bar Association.
David Wirtes, Cunningham Bounds, LLC
David G. Wirtes, Jr. is a member of Cunningham Bounds, LLC of Mobile, Alabama, where he focuses on strategic planning, motion practice and appeals. Mr. Wirtes is licensed in all state and federal courts in Alabama and Mississippi, the Fifth and Eleventh Circuit Courts of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court. He is active in numerous professional organizations, including as a member of the Alabama and Mississippi State Bar Associations, long-time member of the Alabama Supreme Court’s Standing Committee on the Rules of Appellate Procedure, Sustaining Member of the Alabama Association for Justice (and Member of its Board of Governors and Executive Committee (1990-present); Member and/or Chairman, Amicus Curiae Committee (1990-present); and co-editor, the Alabama Association for Justice Journal (1996-present)), and the American Association for Justice where he serves as a Member of its Amicus Curiae Committee (1999-present).
Mr. Wirtes is a Sustaining Fellow and Trustee of the Pound Civil Justice Institute; a Senior Fellow of the Litigation Counsel of America; a Founder and former Executive Director of the American Institute of Appellate Practice (and one of just thirteen persons certified nationwide by AIAP as an Appellate Specialist); and a Sustaining Member and the former Alabama Representative for Public Justice. He has published numerous journal articles and is a frequent lecturer at continuing legal education seminars, addressing topics such as Defeating Unlawful Discrimination in Jury Selection, Evidence, Examination of Witnesses, State Constitutional Protections, Immunity, Appellate Practice and Procedure, Electronic Discovery, and HIPAA and Ex parte Communications with Healthcare Providers.
Kim Martin, Bradley Arant Boult Cummings
Kim Martin is a partner in the Huntsville office of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings. She is a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Alabama School of Law (1994). She focuses her practice on general litigation with an emphasis on medical device and pharmaceutical products liability litigation, as well as white collar matters and False Claims Act litigation. She has tried cases in state and federal court. Most recently, she served as trial counsel defending a nationwide hospice provider in a three-month False Claim Act trial brought by the Department of Justice. The trial team’s efforts ultimately resulted in a dismissal of the case.
Kim routinely represents multi-national pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers in litigation across the country. Most recently, she has been a national team member for sales and marketing issues defending a pharmaceutical company in multi-district litigation throughout the United States. She has a wide range of experience in representing clients in general commercial litigation and was recognized by The Best Lawyers in America® as the Commercial Litigation “Lawyer of the Year” in Huntsville for 2013. She also has extensive experience representing media clients on First Amendment issues and defamation claims. Her trial experience includes defense of personal injury, products liability, commercial litigation, First Amendment, and labor and employment claims.
Kim is a member of Bradley’s Board of Directors. She is currently the President of the North Alabama Federal Bar Association and is a past-President of the Huntsville Madison County Bar Association. Kim has been recognized by The Best Lawyers in America since 2010 and as a Top 50 Women Lawyer by Mid-South Super Lawyers since 2017. Benchmark Litigation has recognized her as one of the Top 250 Women in Litigation, as a Local Litigation Star, and as a National Practice Area Star in the area of product liability. LMG Life Sciences has recognized her as a Life Sciences Star in 2019 and 2020.
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