Rebecca Aviel of the University of Colorado, Sturm College of Law and Emily S. Taylor Poppe of UC Irvine School of Law have been appointed Associate Reporters to Principles of the Law, High-Volume Civil Adjudication. Aviel and Taylor Poppe join Reporter David Freeman Engstrom of Stanford Law School and Associate Reporters David Marcus of UCLA School of Law and Lauren D. Sudeall of Vanderbilt University Law School on the project.
Brief biographies for the newly appointed Associate Reporters are available below.
Rebecca Aviel is a professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. A graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, she practiced in the litigation department of Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco and clerked for Judge Barry Silverman of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She also spent two years as a staff attorney for the Ninth Circuit. Professor Aviel’s research and teaching interests include legal ethics and professional responsibility, family law, and constitutional law, with a scholarly focus on the opportunities for insight where these fields intersect. Her current research examines the role of lawyers in a constitutional democracy, the constitutional implications of professional regulation, and innovation in the delivery of legal services to litigants in family court.
Her recent work, The Weaponization of Attorney’s Fees in an Age of Constitutional Warfare, 132 Yale L.J. 2048 (2023), explains that states are using the threat of catastrophic, one-sided fee awards to evade judicial review in controversial areas like abortion and gun control. Litigants challenging such laws face liability for the opposing party’s legal fees, while the state and its ideological allies bear no such risk. Not only do these provisions thus discriminate on the basis of viewpoint, they obstruct access to counsel by imposing joint and several liability on attorneys for the disfavored parties. For the first time ever, attorneys face fee liability not for any misconduct but solely for representing a certain kind of litigant raising legitimate claims that the state doesn’t want subjected to judicial scrutiny.
Emily S. Taylor Poppe is an interdisciplinary empirical scholar whose research is focused on inequalities in access to civil justice. Her work investigates the origins of civil legal problems and their paths toward resolution, as well as the role of legal actors and institutions in shaping these processes. She has investigated variation in both formal and informal access to legal counsel and has also assessed the effect of legal representation on case outcomes. In other scholarship, she has evaluated how legal education, the regulation of the legal profession, legal technology, and institutional design might enhance equality in access to justice. Finally, in a third stream of scholarship, she evaluates estates and trusts law from an access to justice perspective, offering both legal reforms and policy interventions to enhance equality under the laws governing succession. Her research has appeared in both peer-reviewed journals and law reviews, including Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, UC Davis Law Review, Fordham Law Review, and other journals.
Prof. Taylor Poppe serves as the Faculty Director of The Initiative for Inclusive Civil Justice. She is also co-chair of the New Legal Realism Collaborative Research Network at the Law and Society Association and council member of the Sociology of Law Section of the American Sociological Association.
Before entering academia, Prof. Taylor Poppe was an associate in the Private Client Department of McDermott Will & Emery LLP in Chicago, IL and Associate Director of Planned Giving for the Harvard Business School in Boston, MA. Prof. Taylor Poppe holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Cornell University, a J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law, and A.B. degrees in Public Policy and Spanish from Duke University.