Speaker Biographies
Andy Birchfield is a partner at Beasley Allen, where he manages the firm’s mass torts section. Mr. Birchfield is a regular speaker at national, regional and state seminars pertaining to mass tort litigation. He has been quoted in a number of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Lawyers Weekly USA, American Lawyer, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, U.S. News and World Report, and the New York Times, and he has appeared on 60 Minutes, CNBC’s Closing Bell, National Public Radio, CNN and MSNBC. Mr. Birchfield is the co–lead counsel of the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee for the federal Vioxx litigation and has been the lead or co–lead counsel in five of the Vioxx trials. Mr. Birchfield is a member of the American Association for Justice, the Montgomery Trial Lawyers Associations, the Board of Governors of the Alabama Trial Lawyers Association, and Trial Lawyers for Public Justice. He has served on numerous task forces and committees of the Alabama State Bar.
John E. Calfee is a resident scholar at AEI, where he researches tort liability, advertising and information, Food and Drug Administration regulation, and the pharmaceutical market. He previously served at the Bureau of Economics at the Federal Trade Commission, where he worked on consumer protection matters with special attention to advertising, tobacco, marketing, and the regulation of information; the business schools of the University of Maryland, College Park, and Boston University; and the Brookings Institution. His books include Fear of Persuasion: A New Perspective on Advertising and Regulation (1997), Prices, Markets, and the Pharmaceutical Revolution (AEI Press, 2000), and Biotechnology and the Patent System: Balancing Innovation and Property Rights (with Claude Barfield; AEI Press, 2007). He has also testified before Congress and federal agencies on various topics, including alcohol advertising, biodefense vaccine research, international drug prices, and the Vioxx litigation.
George M. Cohen is the Brokaw Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. He clerked for Judge Walter K. Stapleton of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals during 1987–88 and taught at the University of Pittsburgh from 1988 to 1992. He has taught at the University of Virginia since 1992. He teaches and writes in the areas of professional responsibility, contracts, and agency and partnership. He is a coauthor of the widely used casebook The Law and Ethics of Lawyering (with Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr., Susan P. Koniak, and Roger C. Cramton; fourth edition, 2005), as well as Foundations of the Law and Ethics of Lawyering (with Susan P. Koniak, 2004). He has served as an expert in a number of legal ethics matters.
Ted Frank is a resident fellow at AEI and director of the AEI Legal Center for the Public Interest. He manages the Institute’s research in legal studies and specializes in product liability, class actions, and civil procedure. Before joining AEI, Mr. Frank was a litigator from 1995 to 2005. He has written for law reviews, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and National Review Online. Mr. Frank clerked for Judge Frank H. Easterbrook on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. He writes for the award-winning liability reform blogs PointOfLaw.com and Overlawyered, and the Wall Street Journal has called him a “leading tort-reform advocate.”
Mark Herrmann is a partner in the Chicago office of Jones Day. He has defended multidistrict litigation and hundreds of class actions filed throughout the federal system and in most of the state court systems. Mr. Herrmann is the author of two books: Statewide Coordinated Proceedings: State Court Analogues to the Federal MDL Process (2004) and The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law (2006) and more than fifty articles on legal topics. Mr. Herrmann hosts the Drug and Device Law Blog, the most widely read product liability blog. From 1997 t 2007, he taught complex litigation as an adjunct professor of law at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. Before joining Jones Day, Mr. Herrmann clerked for Judge Dorothy W. Nelson on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Richard Nagareda holds the Tarkington Chair in Teaching Excellence and is the director of the Cecil D. Branstetter Litigation and Dispute Resolution Program at Vanderbilt University Law School. Mr. Nagareda teaches courses on evidence and complex litigation and researches the impact of class action lawsuits on the pursuit of legal rights. He previously taught at the University of Georgia Law School and as a visitor of the University of Texas School of Law. Mr. Nagareda clerked for Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg on the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and practiced law at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and as an associate at Shea & Gardner in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Mass Torts in a World of Settlement (University of Chicago Press, 2007).
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