Nassau Standard

Professor Allison Caffarone has taught at Hofstra Law since 2012. Currently, she is a Professor of Skills and the Executive Director of the newly launched Perry Weitz Mass Tort Institute. We talked with her about getting the Institute started and her goals for the future.

What is the Perry Weitz Mass Tort Institute? 

The Institute was endowed by one of the country’s leading personal injury lawyers, Hofstra Law alumnus Perry Weitz ’83. It is dedicated to studying legal and policy issues raised by mass tort adjudication in the United States. We aim to provide a neutral forum where we bring in experts — judges, lawyers, and scholars — to engage in a collaborative dialogue and candidly discuss these issues that confront us today and look at them from different perspectives. We want to facilitate debate through discourse and legal scholarship. 

We plan to hold conferences, facilitate periodic panel discussions and fireside chats, and to give students exposure and training in the area of mass torts and trial advocacy.  We have an all-star board of advisors comprised of current and former judges, practitioners on both sides of the aisle, and top scholars in the field. 

What interests you about teaching this area of the law? 

This is an interesting time to be teaching torts. In the last few years there have been new questions arising from everything related to the pandemic to the development and use of new technology. With the pandemic, questions arose as to duty, standard of care, causation, liability in the workplace, and future harms, to name just a few. I also think it’s an exciting time to study the interplay between tort law and technology, both from the perspective of technology as a target of the law and by examining technology as a tool of the law. At Hofstra Law, we are fortunate to be able to give our students hands-on experience using the latest technology in the legal field by utilizing the Courtroom of the Future. More generally, teaching torts is great because the cases involve interesting fact patterns that the students can easily relate to and engage with. Since torts is a first-year class, you get students when they’re fresh, hopeful and eager to learn.   

What are some of your goals for the Institute? 

Some of my goals are to inspire our students to promote social change through mass tort adjudication, to show them the importance of pursuing redress for victims and to give them the exposure that is lacking right now.  

Another goal is to prepare our students to be trial lawyers by providing them with the skills necessary to advocate zealously on behalf of clients, whether that be for the plaintiff or defendant. Courtroom skills, such as delivering opening statements and closing arguments and witness examination, cannot be learned from a book. The development of these skills requires hands-on training. Hofstra Law already has excellent programs in this area, such as the Intensive Trial Techniques Program, and I hope the Institute can add to this area. I’d like to connect the Institute with the trial advocacy courses we already have and to integrate mass tort adjudication into some of those programs, bringing in outside lawyers to help teach different parts of the program and integrating courtroom technology. 

I am excited to work with Perry Weitz on his vision for the Institute and where he wants to take it. 

What do you see as the biggest challenges for the Institute? 

Since this is the first year of the Institute, there are a lot of challenges. One challenge is getting students interested in the program. We hosted an inaugural kickoff discussion in November with members of the law firm Weitz & Luxenberg P.C., and I want to have student lunches to find out what the students want to hear about and what they are the most interested in. I’d like to bring in mentors, alumni and faculty to those lunches. We’ll also talk to students who enjoy the first-year torts course to get their thoughts and have them help me conceptualize and put together events. 

Another challenge is bringing in the right people to help get it off the ground. We have to conceptualize programs and identify speakers and panelists. We’ve put together a terrific advisory board who can help with that, including members of the judiciary who are dealing with these issues on a daily basis.  

Promoting the Institute is also something we need to address. We are starting a blog, which will help promote the Institute, but will also provide opportunities for students to write pieces and get their name out there. We intend to encourage lawyers, judges, scholars and business people to write for it as well. I hope to tap into newsletters and law firm client alerts as well asscholarly articles to ask the authors to write excerpts just for our blog. These are ways we can get the most interesting and most relevant breaking news and topics, and bring more interest to the Institute. In this first year, it will be a lot of work on the foundation of the Institute. 

What are you most excited about? 

Mass torts is an area that is in need of reform, but we haven’t come up with a practical solution yet. This is a ripe time for this Institute to come about to get these thought leaders into the building to try to start seeing what we can do. The Institute can be a neutral platform to discuss and brainstorm and debate the issues. And it is a way to remind students that these are real people who went through this experience. This is real life and what you do matters. I think this is an opportunity for students to realize they have the ability to really help people.  

We are in a very privileged place to have the resources, education, and ability to go out and help people and it is part of the responsibility of lawyers to do so. This is the greatest thing I’ve ever done. I love what I do and I love connecting with the students. There are a lot of first-generation lawyers at Hofstra Law. This is a totally new experience for them. They have no idea what to expect or how to deal with it, and it’s very rewarding to help them start to understand the law, to grow in their confidence, and learn to be a lawyer. When you get an email from a student or they tell you in conversation, “I will never forget what you said, it has affected me, and I’ll carry it with me,” there’s nothing like it. It’s easy to forget when you are standing front of the classroom how much power your words have with these students and how much influence you have. You’re in a position to really guide and provide them with opportunities they might not even know exist. 

The connection with students is so important, and at Hofstra Law we have professors who really care about the students, their lives and their careers. It’s one of the really positive things about Hofstra Law. 

What do you do outside of work? 

I enjoy hanging out with my two kids, my husband and my three dogs, attending the kids’ school and sports activities. I’m Italian and we always do Sunday dinner with the family. Family is very important to me. 

Original source can be found here.