Kent Syverud, Dean of the Washington University School of Law, has been named one of two trustees for the $20 billion Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Trust.  As trustee, Dean Syverud will be administering the trust, which presumably means he’ll be signing off on the paying of monies that Kenneth Feinberg and his group award to spill victims.

Syverud, who has a great reputation as Dean at Wash U and previously as Dean at Vanderbilt, has several great articles on settlement that are worth your time:

• The Duty To Settle, 76 Virginia Law Review 1113-1209 (1990)
• Getting to No: A Study of Settlement Negotiations and the Selection of Cases for Trial, 89 Michigan Law Review 319 (with Professor Samuel Gross) (1991)
• Don’t Try: Civil Jury Verdicts In A System Geared To Settlement, 44 UCLA L. Rev. 1 (1996) (with Samuel R. Gross)
• Alternative Dispute Resolution and the Decline of the American Civil Jury, 44 UCLA L. Rev. 1935 (1997);   

Hat tip – the Faculty Lounge