Janet Sabel, Director
Janet Sabel is the Director of NYU Law School’s Center on Civil Justice, as well as the Founding Director of Access to Justice Initiatives. The initiative is an ambitious effort to assist state courts in building robust, equitable and sustainable programs and policies to address the needs of self-represented persons in a reimagined civil court system. Leveraging the resources of NYU Law School, and marrying scholarship and advocacy, transformative ideas and practical steps, the initiative will work with judges and courts nationwide to build a more accessible, problem-solving civil court system that delivers justice to members of underserved communities in housing, family, consumer collection and small claims matters. Janet has worked for nearly forty years as an advocate for social and economic justice. Most recently, she was the Executive Director and Attorney-in-Chief of The Legal Aid Society in New York City, where she previously had spent the first decades of her professional career in Legal Aid’s Civil Practice, representing clients in Housing Court, bringing law reform cases around disability and health law issues, running a neighborhood office, and leading the Immigration Law Unit before serving as Legal Aid’s General Counsel and Chief Administrative Officer.
In between her stints at Legal Aid, Janet spent eight years at the New York State Attorney General’s office, serving initially as Executive Deputy Attorney General for Social Justice and ultimately as a Chief Deputy to two Attorneys General. In these capacities, Janet oversaw the affirmative enforcement work of the Attorney General’s Social and Economic Justice Bureaus, including Civil Rights, Environmental Protection, Labor, Charities, Health Care, Consumer, Antitrust, and Investor Protection.
Janet’s work has been recognized by Cranes (Notable Women in Law), City & State (Power 50, Nonprofit Power, Law Power), the New York State Bar Association (Public Interest Law), New York County Lawyers’ Association (Public Service Award), and The Legal Aid Society (Servant of Justice Award).
Janet received her BA from Harvard College and her JD from NYU Law School where she was a Root Tilden scholar. Janet clerked on the First Circuit Court of Appeals for the Honorable Frank M. Coffin.
David Siffert, Director of Research & Projects
David Siffert is an attorney born-and-raised in New York City. David serves as Director of Research & Projects at the Center on Civil Justice, having previously served as Research Coordinator. David is also an Adjunct Professor of Clinical Law at NYU School of Law, teaching NYU's State Legislative Externship and the Legal Director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.
Prior to joining the Center, David was a civil litigator at Boies, Schiller & Flexner. David clerked for Hon. Robert S. Smith, Associate Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, and Hon. Barbara S. Jones, United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York. David is an alumn of New York University School of Law ('09) and the University of Chicago (AB '06).
Matthew Diller, Distinguished Scholar In Residence
Matthew Diller is one of the nation’s leading voices on access-to-justice issues and a prominent scholar of social welfare law and policy. He is also an expert in legal education, having served as dean in two major law schools.
Diller served as dean of Fordham Law from 2015-2024. Under his leadership, the Law School launched an array of new programs and centers focused on advancing legal scholarship and undertook a series of landmark initiatives focused on transforming the student experience, including the establishment of a 1L house system and the launch of new programs focused on diversity, equity and inclusion, wellness, and professionalism. To bring greater attention to equal-justice issues, Diller launched the Access to Justice (A2J) Initiative at Fordham Law to promote teaching and scholarship in access-to-justice issues while also expanding legal services to vulnerable populations through Fordham Law’s clinics. He was also instrumental in building Fordham Law’s faculty and supporting legal scholarship. During Diller’s tenure, the Law School added 17 new full-time faculty members, deepening its expertise in foundational areas of the law while adding thought leaders in emerging disciplines.
Prior to being appointed dean of Fordham Law, Diller served as dean of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law from 2009 to 2015. He began his teaching career at Fordham Law in 1993 and was named the Cooper Family Professor of Law and co-director of the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics. From 2003 to 2008, he served as the associate dean for academic affairs. Diller worked as a staff attorney in the civil appeals and law reform unit of The Legal Aid Society from 1986 to 1993 and was a law clerk to the Honorable Walter R. Mansfield of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He earned his AB and JD degrees, both magna cum laude, from Harvard University.
Diller has lectured and written extensively on the legal dimensions of social welfare policy, including public assistance, Social Security, and disability programs, and on disability law and policy. His articles have appeared in the The Yale Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, NYU Law Review, Fordham Law Review, Texas Law Review, and Michigan Law Review, among other publications, and he is widely cited as an expert by the media, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and National Law Journal. He has taught a range of law school classes, including Civil Procedure, Administrative Law, Social Welfare Law, and Public Interest Law.
Diller has also lectured internationally on issues relating to the U.S. constitutional system, including lectures in Argentina, China, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Spain and Uruguay.
In addition to his work as an administrator and scholar, Diller is a member of the New York State Permanent Commission on Access to Justice and is chair of the commission’s Committee on Law School Involvement. He has served on the boards of The Legal Aid Society of New York, Legal Services NYC, the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, and Volunteers of Legal Service. He has also served as vice president and a member of the executive committee of the New York City Bar Association and was co-chair of the Association’s Council on the Profession. Diller is a member of the New York State Judicial Institute on Professionalism in the Law and is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation.
Widely recognized by the legal community and beyond, Diller has received numerous awards for his work and scholarship. In 2021, he delivered the Charles Evans Hughes Lecture at the New York County Lawyers Association. In 2014, the AALS Section on Pro Bono and Public Service Opportunities awarded him the Deborah L. Rhode Award for his leadership in legal education and public service. In 1991, the New York City Bar Association honored him with a legal services award. At Fordham Law School, he has been recognized with the Louis J. Lefkowitz Award for the Advancement of Urban Law from the Fordham Urban Law Journal (2000), the Eugene J. Keefe Award for outstanding contributions to the Law School (2002), and the Dean’s Medal of Achievement (2009). In 2024, he received Fordham University’s Presidential Medal.
Stefania Cirillo, Hauser Global Fellow
Stefania Cirillo is a Hauser Post-Doctoral Global Fellow associated with the Center on Civil Justice at NYU, where her current research delves into the influence of ideologies in comparative studies of civil procedure law. She is also a post-doctoral researcher at Bocconi University, Italy, contributing to a project entitled “U.S. dispute resolution mechanisms and novel models of summary adjudication in civil law systems.” Stefania’s primary academic interests lie in Civil Procedure, Bankruptcy Law and Arbitration Law, especially in a comparative perspective. Her recent papers and presentations have explored topics such as comparative research on judicially-led settlement, alternative dispute resolution (ADR) methods, as well as the characteristics of adversarial and non-adversarial systems, and summary judgment.
Stefania earned both her JD in Law and PhD in Legal Studies from Bocconi University. Her doctoral research focused on the role of judicially-led settlement. During her PhD, she spent a period as a visiting PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Procedural Law in Luxembourg.
Before commencing her PhD studies, Stefania gained three years of experience at an international law firm, in the Trial and Litigation Department. She is also an Attorney at Law in Italy.
D. Tinashé Hofisi, Hauser Global Fellow
D. Tinashé Hofisi is a Hauser Post-Doctoral Global Fellow at NYU Law. His research interests include judicial design, constitutional enforcement, human rights, and comparative constitutional law. Tinashé's doctoral project investigates the effectiveness of constitutional adjudication in southern Africa, focusing on Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
He is a YALI Mandela Washington Fellow, an IFES Manatt Fellow, and an ILS Law and Society Fellow. Tinashé has published in the Journal of the International AIDS Society, the Global Administrative Law Series, the Social Science Research Network, the University of Fort Hare's Speculum Juris, and the Zimbabwe Electronic Law Journal. His work is also in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Economic, Social & Cultural Rights.
Tinashé is a frequent blogger and serves as the Secretary General of the Electoral Committee to the African Network of Constitutional Lawyers. For the past four years, he was a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Centre for Law, Society, and Justice, where he developed an interdisciplinary course on courts, constitutionalism, and human rights. His research at NYU assesses the effectiveness of Presidential Election Dispute Resolution (PEDR) in apex African courts in the context of judicial legitimacy and electoral integrity.
He is a human rights lawyer with an SJD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an LLM from Loyola University, Chicago, and a Bachelor of Laws Honors Degree from the University of Zimbabwe. He also holds certificates in Constitution-building in Africa and Strategic Human Rights Litigation from the Central European University.
Susanne Augenhofer, Fellow
Susanne Augenhofer has been a full Professor of Law at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, since January 2020. Before then, she was a Professor of Law at Humboldt University in Berlin as well as at the University of Erfurt in Germany. Before her appointment as Associate Professor at Humboldt University in 2009, Professor Augenhofer conducted research at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law (Hamburg, Germany), the London School of Economics (United Kingdom), and the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). She studied law at the University of Graz (Austria, Mag. Iur.), the Universitá Statale di Milano (Italy), the University of Vienna (Austria, Doctor iuris), and as a Fulbright scholar at Yale Law School (LL.M.) as well as at the Free University Berlin (Germany, LL.M.), where she was supported by a Yale Fox Fellowship.
In 2001, Professor Augenhofer was appointed as Senior Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School, where she was a Visiting Professor in spring 2020 and held the position of Associate Research Scholar from 2014-2020. In spring 2018, she taught at New York University School of Law, where she was a Global Hauser Senior Fellow in 2016–2017 and is currently a Fellow at the NYU Civil Justice Center. She currently serves as a Member of the Council of the European Law Institute (ELI) as well as a Co-Chair of the ELI Austrian Hub. In 2022 she was elected by the ELI as one of three reporters on third party funding and in 2023 she was elected by the ELI as lead-drafter of a response by the ELI to the proposal by the European Commission on the right to repair.
Professor Augenhofer has advised the European Parliament and the European Commission on various issues regarding European fair trading as well as consumer law (including product liability) and its enforcement. She is a member of the Advisory Group on Consumer Policy of the European Commission and the Academic Society for Competition Law. Her research areas include consumer law, contract law, antitrust law and fair-trading law as well as questions of (aggregated) enforcement. Humboldt University in Berlin, Professor Augenhofer was the co-founder of the Humboldt Consumer Law Clinic, the first German legal clinic for consumer rights. She is also a member of the Advisory Board "Smart Regulation" at the University of Graz.
Her research focuses on a range of issues across consumer law, including international and European contract law, fair trade, and advertising law, as well as antitrust law. A special emphasis is placed on the enforcement of consumer rights, as well as legal comparison in the context of the harmonization of private law in the European Union and transnational settings. Her current research focuses on the liability of businesses for corporate speech, warranty law in the digital age and during the green transition, and the current state of class actions in the United States and Europe.
In Memoriam: Peter Zimroth, Founding Director
Peter Zimroth was the founding director of NYU Law School’s Center on Civil Justice. While serving as an adjunct professor at the Law School, he also served as the independent monitor appointed by the United States District Court to oversee the New York City Police Department's compliance with the court’s orders regarding the NYPD’s practices and policies regarding “stop, question and frisk” and enforcement of trespass laws.
Mr. Zimroth was an accomplished trial lawyer and appellate advocate, as well as a leading litigator in products liability, commercial, securities, and criminal law matters. He tried jury and nonjury cases and arbitrations, argued appeals at every level of state and federal court (including in the US Supreme Court), and represented clients before government and regulatory agencies, disciplinary panels, and congressional committees.
Earlier in his career, Mr. Zimroth was corporation counsel of the City of New York. The corporation counsel, the city's chief legal officer, oversees all the city's legal business, and heads the city's law department of more than 500 lawyers. As corporation counsel, Mr. Zimroth supervised major litigations, was the prosecuting authority in juvenile cases and provided counsel on employment issues, major economic development projects, city contract and procurement policies, environmental, healthcare, law enforcement, transportation and education issues, tort and products liability, and legislation. He was the architect of the City's law providing for the public financing of city elections, a law which has become the model for local legislation around the country. Mr. Zimroth served as an assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York (securities fraud unit) and as the chief assistant district attorney in Manhattan, the highest non-elected position in the district attorney's office. He was a tenured professor at the New York University School of Law and a law clerk to US Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas and to Chief Judge David Bazelon of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. He was the editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. He was appointed by the chief judge of New York State to serve as one of the three directors of the now defunct Capital Defender’s Office, which had the responsibility of ensuring legal representation for indigents charged with capital offenses and served on the Moreland Commission appointed by Governor Andrew Cuomo to report on campaign finance and related ethical issues.