Ted Frank

Theodore Harold Frank (born December 14, 1968) is an American lawyer, activist, and legal writer based in Washington, D.C.^[1] He is the counsel of record and petitioner in Frank v. Gaos, the first Supreme Court case to deal with the issue of cy pres in class action settlements; he is one of the few Supreme Court attorneys ever to argue his own case.^[2] He wrote the vetting report of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin for the John McCain campaign in the 2008 presidential election.^[3] He founded the Center for Class Action Fairness (CCAF) in 2009; it temporarily merged with the Competitive Enterprise Institute in 2015,^[4][5] but as of 2019 CCAF is now part of the new Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, a free-market nonprofit public-interest law firm founded by Frank and his CCAF colleague Melissa Holyoak.^[6]

The New York Times calls him the "leading critic of abusive class-action settlements";^[7] the Wall Street Journal has referred to him as "a leading tort-reform advocate"^[8] and praised his work exposing dubious practices by plaintiffs' attorneys in class actions.^[9][10]

Frank graduated from Brandeis University in 1991, and the University of Chicago Law School in 1994 with a JD. A litigator from 1995 to 2005, and a former clerk for Frank H. Easterbrook on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Frank was a director and fellow of the Legal Center for the Public Interest at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.^[11][12][13] He was an adjunct fellow at Manhattan Institute’s Center for Legal Policy, where he was editor of the Institute's web magazine, PointofLaw.com. He was on the Executive Committee of the Federalist Society's Litigation Practice Group and contributed to conservative legal weblogs, and, as of 2008, was a member of the American Law Institute.^[14]