ABOUT THE SITE

This site provides attorneys, judges, law professors and students with a comprehensive resource on class action law. Special emphasis is placed on the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (CAFA), and issues regarding attorney's fees. The editor is William B. Rubenstein, Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

PROFESSOR RUBENSTEIN

William B. Rubenstein
Professor of Law
Born Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1960
B.A. Yale, 1982
J.D. Harvard, 1986
Contact: [email protected]

     Professor William Rubenstein writes about civil litigation and teaches a variety of courses about adjudication including Civil Procedure, Complex Litigation, and Remedies. Professor Rubenstein's work emphasizes class action law: he has published, litigated, and served as an expert witness in the field and he regularly provides consulting services to attorneys involved in complex procedural matters. In 2004, the American Law Institute selected Professor Rubenstein to be an Adviser on its current effort to re-think class action law, The Project on Aggregate Litigation and Class Actions.

     Professor Rubenstein has published numerous articles on both civil procedure and civil rights and won the Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2002.

     Professor Rubenstein clerked for Hon. Stanley Sporkin of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. From 1987-1995, he worked as a staff attorney and project director at the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union, where he litigated complex civil rights cases in state and federal courts throughout the country. Before joining the Harvard Law School faculty in 2007, Professor Rubenstein taught for a decade at UCLA School of Law, and previously as an adjunct faculty member at Yale and Stanford Law Schools. He is a member of the bars of California, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, the United State Supreme Court, and numerous federal circuit and district courts.

Publications on Class Actions and Procedure

• Finality in Class Action Litigation: Lessons From Habeus
  New York University Law Review.  Vol. 82; 2007.

• The Fairness Hearing: Adversarial and Regulatory Approaches
  UCLA Law Review.  Vol. 53; 2006.

• Why Enable Litigation?: A Positive Externalities Theory of the Small Claims Class Action
  University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review.  Vol. 74, 2006; UCLA School of Law Research Paper No. 06-10.

• Understanding the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005
  2005.

• On What a Private Attorney General is - And Why it Matters
  Vanderbilt Law Review.  Vol. 57, No. 6, P. 2129; November 2004.

• The Concept of Equality in Civil Procedure
  Cardozo Law Review.  Vol. 23; 2002.

• A Transactional Model of Adjudication
  Georgetown Law Journal.  Vol. 89, No. 2; January 2001.

• The Myth of Superiority
  Constitutional Commentary.  Vol. 16, No. 3; 1999.