Elizabeth Chamblee Burch joined the Georgia Law faculty in 2011. She was promoted to the rank of full professor in 2015. Burch's teaching and research interests include civil procedure, class actions and mass torts.
In 2015, Burch was awarded the American Law Institute’s Young Scholars Medal in recognition of her work on class actions and multidistrict litigation, and its potential to influence improvements in the law. Her scholarship has been published in respected journals such as New York University Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Boston University Law Review and George Washington Law Review, among others. She co-authors a casebook titled The Law of Class Actions and Other Aggregate Litigation with the late Richard A. Nagareda, Robert G. Bone, Charles Silver, and Patrick Woolley.
Burch was elected as a member of the American Law Institute in 2013, and is a frequent commentator in various national news media, such as National Public Radio’s Marketplace, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,USA Today and The L.A. Times.
Before joining Georgia Law's faculty, she was an assistant professor at Florida State University College of Law, where she received the university-wide Graduate Teaching Award and was voted “Professor of the Year” by second- and third-year students. Burch began her academic career in 2006 at Cumberland School of Law, part of Samford University, where she received the Harvey S. Jackson Excellence in Teaching Award and the Lightfoot, Franklin & White Faculty Scholarship Award. In 2014, she received Georgia Law’s John C. O’Byrne Memorial Award for Significant Contributions Furthering Student-Faculty Relations.
Before entering the legal academy, Burch worked as an associate at Holland & Knight in Atlanta, where she practiced in the area of complex litigation, including securities class actions. She has served as the mass torts subcommittee chair for the American Bar Association's Class Action and Derivative Suits Committee, on the executive board for the American Association of Law Schools’ Scholarship Committee, and as a co-editor of theMass Tort Litigation Blog.
She earned her bachelor's degree cum laude from Vanderbilt University and her Juris Doctor cum laude from Florida State University, where she served as the writing and research editor for the Florida State University Law Review.