By Suzi Morales
Assistant Professor of Law Gilat Juli Bachar always loved writing, but when she pictured her career, she thought of a very different kind of writing than what she does now.
“Initially, I thought it was going to be more like novel writing and maybe it will still happen at some point,” she says, “but my passion for law grew from that and the love of writing and how to put things in a way that will be most persuasive and most interesting and gets the reader’s attention.”
Bachar also wanted to contribute to social change and enjoyed mentoring and teaching. Today, she combines those interests at Temple University Beasley School of Law, teaching courses including torts, professional responsibility, and negotiation and settlement. She also applies her creative approach to studying the psychology of civil disputes and how non-lawyers approach legal questions.
How transparent should settlement be?
Bachar takes a somewhat unconventional approach to confidentiality and transparency in resolving civil disputes, finding that in some instances, the public good should be weighed more heavily than the interests of individual litigants. Bachar applies empirical methods like surveys and interviews to explore how people think about civil litigation and settlement. She also studies the theoretical side of the tension between individual and public interests in private disputes.
According to Bachar, confidential civil settlement “puts front and center this tension between what is good for you individually and what is good for society, especially for thinking about the kinds of disputes that have broader societal impact, [like] sexual harassment or sexual abuse but even things like products liability. … Other people could suffer similar harm if nobody knows about it, if you keep it under wraps.”
Bachar recognizes that there are valid concerns about fewer or less favorable settlements if confidentiality isn’t available as a bargaining chip. “We need to take these concerns into account but we also need to think about what kind of society we want to live in and how do we promote the values that are important to us,” she says.
In addition to her work on confidential settlements, Bachar also has a work in progress looking at whether bystanders should have a duty to warn others about potentially harmful activity. This could be anything from a former employer withholding information about a serial harasser to a data broker that is aware of stalkers tracking personal information. The current legal default is that there is no duty to warn, with certain exceptions such as for mental health professionals. While the article is still in the works, she plans to make an argument for a duty to warn by individuals she calls “informed bystanders.”
For the greater good
Bachar points to a short story to illustrate the impact of an individual disclosing information for the greater good: Claire Keegan’s “Small Things Like These,” which follows one man’s inadvertent discovery and struggle to confront the complicity of his Irish village to abuses by the local church. “It evokes a similar theme and this idea that as an individual you can do something … but there is this tension because it could really be a burden on you,” she says. “Do you have to do something for the greater good to prevent harm to other people when you’re not the one causing that harm?”
Because she studies personal motivations in the often-stressful setting of civil litigation, Bachar has no shortage of material if she ever chooses to write fiction. Bachar speculates that any novel she wrote would cover similar themes to her academic work. “You can’t necessarily bring all of this into a research paper or even an academic book,” she notes. “Some of it is just really rich stories and things that would be interesting to a broader audience.”