Brian T. Fitzpatrick is the Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise at Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville, Tennessee (USA).  His research and teaching focus on American class action litigation.  He is the author of the award-winning book, The Conservative Case for Class Actions (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and well as co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook on Class Actions: An International Survey (Cambridge University Press, 2021).  He is best known for his empirical studies of class actions, especially his 2010 peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.  Professor Fitzpatrick joined Vanderbilt’s law faculty in 2007 after serving as the John M. Olin Fellow at New York University School of Law. He graduated first in his class from Harvard Law School and clerked for Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court.  After his clerkships, Professor Fitzpatrick practiced commercial and appellate litigation for several years at Sidley Austin in Washington, D.C., and served as Special Counsel for Supreme Court Nominations to U.S. Senator John Cornyn. Before earning his law degree, Fitzpatrick graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s of science in chemical engineering from the University of Notre Dame.  He has received the Hall-Hartman Outstanding Professor Award for his Civil Procedure course.