Pulling in some heavy hitters from the realms of legal academia, practice and the bench, the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School promises to step up to the plate to provide serious class action information as it hosts a live symposium tying together class action litigation — past, present and future. “20th Anniversary of Schutts: Class Actions in the New Millennium,” to be held on April 7, 2006, marks the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision which set constitutional limits on state courts seeking blanket application of the forum’s law to nationwide class actions.

The lineup includes Arthur R. Miller, who argued Shutts to the Supreme Court and is now the Bruce Bromley Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He and the Hon. Diane P. Wood, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, are keynote speakers. Symposium Chair and Moderator Robert Klonoff, now on the faculty at UMKC, has insider experience in academia, government and private practice. A former assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States, Klonoff is now a professor at UMKC and also serves as counsel with a major law firm.
There’s more: the roster of nearly two dozen panelists of jurists, lawyers and academics includes the Hon. Lee H. Rosenthal of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Elizabeth J. Cabraser of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, and Linda S. Mullenix, professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.
The event promises to cover some serious turf on the class action landscape: securities class actions, mass torts class actions, labor and employment class actions, ethical issues in class action litigation, and, of course, the Class Action Fairness Act itself. And a networking happy hour, to boot. What more can you ask for?