EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR - CENTER ON CIVIL JUSTICE

Description

The Center on Civil Justice is conducting a search for an executive director to be in charge of all activities of the Center.  He or she will work with the Center’s faculty co-directors and the chair of the advisory board. In its decade at NYU, the Center has had two directors, Peter Zimroth and the Honorable Beverly Martin.  They have led the Center into important work on litigation finance, issues in complex litigation, the impact of debt collection and other high volume litigation on poorer citizens, the evolving field of antitrust enforcement, and the impact of AI on the legal profession – among others.  The work takes the form of conferences, research projects and coordinated programs with the judiciary and the bar.  An overview is provided on the Center’s website: http://www.law.nyu.edu/centers/civiljustice

From its inception, the Center on Civil Justice at New York University School of Law has been dedicated to the study of the present functioning and future prospects of the civil litigation system in the United States. The Center is designed to fill a void in scholarly and policy analysis and to draw on the unmatched strengths of NYU in the field of procedure and complex litigation, as well as a board of advisors composed of leading practitioners and judges.

This has been a particularly suitable time for NYU Law School to host this Center. The legal profession is now roughly seventy-five years into the modern era of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). For all the promise of the FRPC to cut through the technical, non-merits forms of action of the common law period, the hoped for "just, speedy, and inexpensive" adjudication of disputes appears an increasingly distant vision. Our legal world is far more complex than the FRCP could ever have envisioned.

In our current world economy, even routine transactions can implicate legal oversight by many different jurisdictions-local, national, and multi-national-all with their own administrative, statutory, and adjudicatory regimes. The complications and costs of adjudication have bloated. This, in turn, has meant that large groups of litigants have been forced to defend themselves in hugely consequential litigations (e.g., home foreclosures, deportations) in a system they cannot afford; others with legitimate claims cannot afford to assert them; and still others, who have substantial resources, complain about the excessive costs of litigation and the destructive effect on business and competitiveness.

The goal of the Center on Civil Justice is to look realistically at the factors that have stressed our civil justice system, and to provide a forum for research, discussion, and writing on ways that the needs of the participants in our justice system can be more satisfactorily met, while preserving the values essential to maintain the civil justice system's station as one of the great pillars of our democracy. The Center joins scholars, practicing lawyers, judges, court administrators, and other interested participants and encourages them to explore anew the role that litigation plays in our legal system, the values that need to be preserved, and what can be done in the modern age to preserve them.

The Center on Civil Justice follows the same principles as the other successful Centers already in place at NYU. The Center's goal is to provide a fertile environment for scholarly inquiry, leveraging the practical insight and experience of practitioners, judges, and administrators. Toward that end, the Center conducts research; organizes conferences drawing on law professors, practitioners, and judges; provides a unique forum for the discussion and debate of proposed civil justice reforms, and seeks ways to follow these discussions and debates with concrete proposals or projects. 

The Center operates under the direction of an Executive Director and our resident faculty directors, Professors Samuel Issacharoff, Arthur Miller, Geoffrey Miller, and Troy McKenzie (on leave to serve as the Dean of the law school). In addition, the Center has an advisory board made up of leading practicing lawyers, each in his or her individual capacity, drawn from the plaintiffs' bar and the defense bar, as well as leading members of the judiciary. The chair of the board of advisors is Sheila Birnbaum, who is serving as Interim Director during the search for a new director.

Salary:

In compliance with NYC's Pay Transparency Act, the annual base salary range for this position is $143,000-$213,000. New York University considers factors such as (but not limited to) scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience, education/training, key skills, internal peer equity, as well as market and organizational considerations when extending an offer.This position comes with a competitive salary and a generous array of