At noon on Thursday, May 25, at the Madison Club and via Zoom, please join the DCBA when Madison Attorney Tim Burns presents the Dane County Bar Association’s annual U.S. Supreme Court civil case review (previously presented by Eric Barber put for many years before the pandemic). Tim’s presentation will focus on the results of the Court’s decisions in the past few terms, rather than the intricacies of Supreme Court doctrine. Borrowing the title of Drew Pearson and Robert Allen’s famous 1936 book, Tim asks the question whether the results in recent Supreme Court cases show that this Supreme Court is taking us back to a pre-New Deal place in our constitutional law. Are penumbras of privacy, dignity, and equality, and democracy being replaced by penumbras of economic liberty, religious freedom, and limited collective action? Is our Supreme Court recreating a form of government that worked well in the horse-and-buggy days, but was overtaken by the march of modern events?

Tim and some his colleagues left Perkins Coie days before the pandemic began to open their own law firm, Burns Bair LLP, which focuses on representing childhood sexual abuse survivors in Catholic Church bankruptcies and in representing injured persons with respect to the insurance aspects of mass tort and class action litigation. Tim and his firm now serve as special insurance counsel in several Diocesan bankruptcies and most recently were retained as insurance counsel by the Hair Relaxer MDL Leadership in the Revlon Bankruptcy. Tim is widely viewed as one of the top insurance recovery trial lawyers in the country and has recovered more than $75 million for each of more than a dozen clients. He and his colleagues are responsible for engineering the largest fully-funded-by insurance-derivative-action settlement in history ($240 million) for the Board of Directors of Wells Fargo. Formerly a national board member of the American Constitution Society, Tim now serves on the national board of advisors of that organization. He also is active in the American Law Institute.