Brian Fitzpatrick

Media Appearances

• Lawyers Seeking Fees Can Be Less Shamelessly Self-Interested

  Brian Fitzpatrick, a Vanderbilt University law school professor who is one of the country’s leading fee petition experts, said Garson’s case is the only instance he’s ever seen a lawyer hired specifically to make a fee argument.

  September 19th, 2024

• With Dell decision, Delaware justices reconfirm Chancery judges’ discretion over megafees

  Vanderbilt University law professor Brian Fitzpatrick, who filed an amicus brief, opens new tab urging the Delaware Supreme Court not to adopt the declining-percentage model, said in an interview that the justices were “honest” about “the dilemma judges face all over the country” when they consider big fee requests.

  August 15th, 2024

• Fight, settle or split? How a $60mn damages verdict is piling pressure on Reckitt

  “It is going to be hard to button this thing up nicely,” said Brian Fitzpatrick, an expert on class-action litigation at Vanderbilt University, arguing that Reckitt — which is facing many more claims in relation to Enfamil — would have to fight it out over several trials. “That is going to take a while, and it is going to require victories,” he said.

  March 22nd, 2024

• Alabama IVF ruling highlights importance of state supreme court races in this year’s US elections

  “In many cases, state supreme courts have a lot of power to shut down direct democracy by preventing a question from getting on the ballot,” said Brian Fitzpatrick, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School.

  March 1st, 2024

• Biden lawyer who defended affirmative action grapples with diversity in her own office

  “It’s possible that having people of multiple races in the room when you’re writing your briefs and preparing for the argument could make the briefs better and the arguments better,” said Brian Fitzpatrick, a former clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia and a professor at Vanderbilt Law School. “I’m certainly open to that. But I just don’t think we should engage in racial discrimination based on speculation.”

  July 24th, 2023

• What will colleges do in wake of affirmative action ruling?

  “The Court recognized the Constitution guarantees equal treatment for all races, and exceptions to that rule should be rare and fleeting. I do not expect universities to take this decision lightly — DEI has become one of the highest (if not the highest) priority at many schools — and I expect universities to look for loopholes and workarounds,” Brian Fitzpatrick, professor of law at Vanderbilt University, said.

  June 29th, 2023

• The Politics of Litigation May Be Changing

  But there’s at least one conservative legal scholar who argues that suing companies was a Republican thing before it was a Democratic thing and could once again be a Republican thing. Brian Fitzpatrick, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, made his case in a 2019 book, “The Conservative Case for Class Actions.” Fitzpatrick wrote that Republicans used to understand that if class action lawsuits are suppressed, the only alternative will be more government regulation. For decades, Republicans favored using the courts while Democrats leaned toward regulation. To many economists, a class action appears efficient: It’s a way to aggregate many small claims, each of which would not be worth pursuing on its own, into one big claim that is worth suing over.

  July 25th, 2022

• Trump files class action lawsuits targeting Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube over ‘censorship’ of conservatives

  “The fact that they benefit from a federal law does not transform someone into the federal government,” said Brian Fitzpatrick, a professor of law at Vanderbilt University. “All of us benefit from laws at some point or another and that doesn’t transform us into the federal government.”

  July 7th, 2021

• Trump sues Twitter, Facebook, Google – and immediately begins fundraising off the effort

  “I think the lawsuit has almost no chance of success,” Vanderbilt University law professor Brian Fitzpatrick told CNBC in a phone interview. The tech platforms are private entities, not government institutions, and therefore the plaintiffs’ claims about constitutional violations do not hold up, Fitzpatrick said.

  July 7th, 2021

• Trump-appointed judges under an election-year political lens

  “I think it’s very unusual to make it so explicit that this decision had nothing to do with the judge’s predispositions,” said Brian Fitzpatrick, a Vanderbilt University law professor. “That is something that normally should go without saying.” But as Fitzpatrick noted, those who sift and weigh a judge’s decisions often overlook the fact that judges must act within the tight confines of law and jurisprudence and “don’t have unfettered discretion like politicians think they do.”

  September 24th, 2020