Gilat J. Bachar is the 2025 winner of the prestigious Warren E. Burger Prize, a writing competition sponsored by the American Inns of Court to promote scholarship in the area of professionalism, ethics, civility, and excellence. To be presented at the 2025 Celebration of Excellence at the Supreme Court of the United States, the award recognizes Bachar’s paper “Plaintiffs’ Lawyers’ Disclosure Duties.”

The winning paper, which will be published in the UC Davis Law Review, urges lawyers representing plaintiffs in civil litigation to counter what Bachar calls “the culture of silence in civil litigation” and consider their ethical responsibilities more broadly.

Often, Bachar explains, lawyers end up participating in settlements that conceal risks to public health and safety. Negotiated nondisclosure agreements like those used by General Motors and Harvey Weinstein, for example, can hide patterns of misconduct and abuse from scrutiny and thus perpetuate those patterns. While the Model Rules of Professional Conduct prioritize lawyers’ duties toward their clients, Bachar’s paper argues that lawyers should extend their ethical obligations and resist secrecy that could endanger others. Drawing on the work of legal ethicists, the paper calls for making a practical change to the existing ethical framework: requiring lawyers to inform prospective clients at the very outset of litigation that they will not negotiate nondisclosure agreements that conceal risks to public health or safety.

Bachar is an associate professor of law at Temple University Beasley School of Law, where she specializes in tort law, legal ethics, dispute resolution, and law and psychology. Before joining Temple as an assistant professor in 2022, she was a visiting assistant professor of law at Villanova University’s Charles Widger School of Law. Earlier in her career, Bachar was a research fellow at the Stanford Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession and a legal fellow at the Center for Justice & Accountability. She was also an associate at a Tel Aviv law firm specializing in commercial litigation. She was a law clerk for Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch of the Supreme Court of Israel and for the Criminal Department of the State Attorney Office in Jerusalem.

Bachar earned a doctor of the science of law degree from Stanford Law School in 2018. She earned a summa cum laude master’s of business administration from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2011 and a summa cum laude undergraduate law degree from the same institution in 2010.

The American Inns of Court, headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, inspires the legal community to advance the rule of law by achieving the highest level of professionalism through example, education, and mentoring. The organization’s membership includes nearly 30,000 federal, state, and local judges; lawyers; law professors; and law students in nearly 370 chapters nationwide. More information is available at www.innsofcourt.org.

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Gilat J. Bachar has been named recipient of the prestigious 2025 American Inns of Court Warren E. Burger Prize for Writing.