Erwin Chemerinsky
Dean and Professor, UC Berkeley School of Law
Founding Chair of the Initiative
Erwin Chemerinsky is Dean and Professor at UC Berkeley School of Law. Prior to becoming Dean of Berkeley Law, he was the founding Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law, and Raymond Pryke Professor of First Amendment Law, at UC Irvine School of Law, with a joint appointment in Political Science. Previously, he was the Alston and Bird Professor of Law and Political Science at Duke University, and before that was a professor at the University of Southern California Law School, including as the Sydney M. Irmas Professor of Public Interest Law, Legal Ethics, and Political Science. Dean Chemerinsky is one of the most cited legal scholars in the country. Publications and CV
Anne Bloom
Executive Director
Anne Bloom has a distinguished record of accomplishment in both academia and public interest law. Before becoming the Executive Director of the Civil Justice Research Initiative, she was the Director of Public Programs for Equal Justice Works in Washington, D.C. and Associate Director of the Civil Justice Program at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. Prior to that, she was Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Law at McGeorge Law School where she taught courses in litigation, law and politics, and public interest law. Before becoming a professor, Anne was a staff attorney at Public Justice in Washington, D.C. She holds both a J.D. and a Ph.D. in political science and has authored many articles on civil justice-related subjects. Her most recent publication is a co-edited volume with David M. Engel and Michael McCann, Injury and Injustice: The Cultural Politics of Harm and Redress (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Publications and CV
Gerald Singleton
Chair
Gerald Singleton began his legal career as a trial attorney at Federal Defenders of San Diego in 2000, where he represented federal criminal defendants in the Southern District of California and before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He left Federal Defenders in 2003 to start his own practice, which has grown from a sole proprietorship into the national firm of Singleton Schreiber, LLP, with over 90 attorneys and 400 employees and over a dozen offices throughout the United States. Mr. Singleton is one of the nation’s leading experts in fire litigation. Over the past two decades, he and his team have represented over 30,000 fire victims in more than 30 wildfires in California, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Colorado and Texas, and have recovered over $3 billion on their behalf. Mr. Singleton has served as liaison counsel and in other positions of leadership in complex civil cases in multiple states. He currently serves as court-appointed liaison counsel in the Eaton Fire case in Los Angeles and the Dixie Fire case in San Francisco. In 2020, Mr. Singleton was appointed by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court to serve on the Oversight Committee of the $13.5 billion Fire Victim Trust. He is the chair of the American Association of Justice’s national wildfire litigation group and has lectured on fire litigation across the country. Over the past several years, Mr. Singleton has expanded the firm’s practice to include representing public entities and individuals in environmental and toxic tort litigation across the country. In 2023, he and his team brought the first medical-monitoring claim to address carcinogens and other dangerous toxins in wildfire smoke. In 2024, Singleton Schreiber partnered with the NAACP to bring litigation on behalf of thousands of women who developed cancer and/or uterine fibroids from exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals in over-the-counter hair relaxer products. The firm’s Environmental practice group is working with state and local agencies and non-profit advocacy groups to bring pollution claims on behalf of frontline communities exposed to toxins from the oil and gas industry. Mr. Singleton graduated cum laude from Dartmouth College, where he earned high honors and the departmental prize in Government for his senior honors thesis. He received his juris doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law in 2000, and is licensed to practice in the state courts of California, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Texas, Missouri, Ohio, Minnesota and the District of Columbia, multiple federal district courts, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the United States Supreme Court. An active member of the American Association for Justice, the Consumer Attorneys of California, and numerous other state bar associations, Mr. Singleton is also a contributor and fundraiser for Democratic candidates and progressive causes.
Andrew Bradt
Faculty Director
Andrew Bradt’s primary scholarly interests are in the areas of civil procedure, conflict of laws, and remedies. His current research focuses on the adaptation of procedural and choice-of-law systems to large-scale multijurisdictional litigation, with a particular interest in federal multidistrict litigation. In 2019, he received Berkeley Law’s Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction. Bradt’s scholarship has been published in numerous law journals and has been cited by both courts and prominent legal treatises. He is a co-author, with Geoffrey C. Hazard, William A. Fletcher, and Stephen McG. Bundy, of Pleading and Procedure—Cases and Materials (12th ed., Foundation Press, 2020), and a co-author, with Edward Sherman, Richard Marcus, and Howard Erichson, of the forthcoming Complex Litigation—Cases and Materials on Advanced Civil Procedure (7th ed., West Academic). In 2018, Bradt was appointed by the Counselor to the Chief Justice of the United States to the Supreme Court Fellows Program’s Academic Advisory Board. In 2019, he was elected to the membership of the American Law Institute, and he serves on the Members Consultative Groups for the Restatement (Third), Conflict of Laws, and the Restatement (Third), Torts: Remedies. Immediately prior to joining the Berkeley Law faculty, Bradt was a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. Before entering academia, Bradt worked as a litigator in the Issues & Appeals Group at Jones Day in New York City, and at Ropes & Gray in Boston. He also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Robert A. Katzmann of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Honorable Patti B. Saris of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He is a member of the state bars of Massachusetts and New York. Bradt graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he received the Joseph H. Beale Prize for Conflict of Laws, and summa cum laude from Harvard College, where he concentrated in Social Studies.