Rate My Professor Elizabeth Burch

Elizabeth Chamblee Burch holds the Fuller E. Callaway Chair of Law at the University of Georgia School of Law, where she joined the faculty in 2011 as an associate professor and was promoted to full professor in 2015. She held the Charles H. Kirbo Chair of Law from 2016 to 2018 before assuming the Callaway Chair in 2019 and served as visiting professor at Harvard Law School in 2017. Previously, Burch was an assistant professor at Florida State University College of Law from 2008 to 2011, receiving the university-wide Graduate Teaching Award and being voted Professor of the Year, and at Cumberland School of Law, Samford University from 2006 to 2008, where she earned the Harvey S. Jackson Excellence in Teaching Award and Lightfoot, Franklin & White Faculty Scholarship Award. She began her professional career as an associate at Holland & Knight LLP in Atlanta from 2004 to 2006, practicing complex litigation including securities class actions. Burch received her B.A. in English cum laude from Vanderbilt University in 2000, J.D. cum laude from Florida State University College of Law in 2004, and M.F.A. in Narrative Nonfiction from the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism in 2023.

Her academic interests center on civil procedure, class actions, and mass torts. Burch authored Mass Tort Deals: Backroom Bargaining in Multidistrict Litigation (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and The Pain Brokers: How Con Men, Call Centers, and Rogue Doctors Fuel America’s Lawsuit Factory (One Signal/Simon & Schuster, 2026). She co-authored the casebook The Law of Class Actions and Other Aggregate Litigation, third edition (West Academic Publishing, 2020), with Richard A. Nagareda, Robert G. Bone, and Patrick Woolley. She has published over 40 articles in top journals such as the Yale Law Journal Forum, New York University Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Vanderbilt Law Review, influencing scholarship on multidistrict litigation and aggregate proceedings. Awards include the American Law Institute's Early Career Scholars Medal (2015), Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Professional Responsibility Scholarship (2016), and Mangano Dispute Resolution Advancement Award (2019). Elected to the American Law Institute in 2013, she has given over 140 lectures to law professors, federal judges, and others worldwide and appeared in media including NPR's Marketplace, BBC World News, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Burch chaired the mass torts subcommittee of the American Bar Association's Class Action and Derivative Suits Committee and co-edits the Mass Tort Litigation Blog.