"The Law of the Back-End"
Professor of Law Maria Glover, Georgetown University
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Professor Glover’s talk addressed a series of cross-cutting issues that arise in mass litigation after settlements have been reached—the “back end” of mass litigation. Settlements have long been described as the dominant endgame of mass litigation. Professor Glover argues, however, that for a great many mass litigations, including those regarding NFL Concussions, the BP Oil Spill, RoundUp, Volkswagen Diesel Emissions, In re National Prescription Opiates, Asbestos, and many more, settlement is just the beginning.
Prior to finalizing mass litigation settlements, our system of civil justice relies on a number of formalities that create, facilitate, and harness transparency, adversarialism, and the development of law to protect parties, produce fair and reasonable settlements, and to achieve global peace. Once mass litigation moves from the period of establishing liability to the period of administration of claims, however, these critical elements of civil justice—transparency, adversarialism, and the development of law—break down. Professor Glover calls for the development of “Back-End Law” for mass litigation settlement, law that would create transparency, introduce and harness adversarialism, and generate needed development of precedent in this critical area of civil justice.
Professor Glover is an expert in complex litigation and mass torts, aggregate dispute resolution, civil procedure, civil settlements, and the intersection between private and public regulation. Her work has been published in the NYU Journal of Law & Business and the law reviews of Yale, Stanford, NYU, University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt, William and Mary, and Fordham, among others. In addition to publications in leading law reviews and business journals, her work has been featured in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Consumer Reports, Reuters, The Hill, Bloomberg Law, among other media outlets, and has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The first edition of her casebook, CIVIL PROCEDURE, with Howard Erichson was published in 2020 by Wolters Kluwer. Professor Glover also is co-authoring a casebook, AGGREGATE LTIGATION AND DISPUTE RESOLUTION, with Robert Klonoff, D. Theodore Rave and Elizabeth Cabraser, which will be published by Thompson West in 2022.
In September 2021, Professor Glover combined the insights and connections from her work in complex litigation with years-long pro bono work for substance use disorder recovery centers in East Tennessee (where she grew up) to host the Opioid Litigation Summit at Georgetown University Law Center. This Summit was held at a critical juncture in the overdose crisis, as drug overdoses are taking more lives than ever, and litigation against opioid manufacturers is in courtrooms and at settlement tables across the nation. The Summit was the first of its kind: It convened key experts in comprehensive, divergent, and cross-cutting fields—complex litigation, public health and policy, state and local government, members of the Biden-Harris Administration, and people in recovery—for a series of dynamic strategy sessions on maximizing opioid settlement funds to save lives and respond to the overdose crisis.
Before coming to Georgetown in 2012, Professor Glover was a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. Previously, she clerked for J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and practiced in the Supreme Court and Appellate Practice Group at Mayer Brown LLP in Washington, DC. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt Law School, where she was senior article editor of the Vanderbilt Law Review and was awarded the Cecil D. Branstetter Litigation and Dispute Resolution Program Award, the Robert F. Jackson Memorial Prize for the highest scholastic average in the law class, the Law Review Editor's Award, and the First Year Mock Trial Best Oralist Award.
DePaul College of Law is an accredited Illinois MCLE provider. This presentation has been approved for one hour of CLE credit.