A team of scholars including Professor Jonah B. Gelbach is one of two recipients of the 2026 Civil Justice Scholarship Award from the National Civil Justice Institute for an article published in the University of Chicago Law Review last year.
“Shedding Light on Secret Settlements: An Empirical Study of California’s STAND Act” is an empirical and qualitative study analyzing how California’s ban on secrecy in sexual-misconduct settlements has functioned in practice, testing longstanding assumptions about the effects of restricting non-disclosure agreements. Gelbach’s co-authors are Stanford Law School Professors David Freeman Engstrom and Nora Freeman Engstrom, then-Stanford student Garrett Wen, and University of Chicago Bigelow Fellow Austin Peters.
To explore litigation patterns before and after the state’s 2018 Stand Together Against Non-Disclosure (STAND) Act took effect, the team analyzed more than a quarter-million case filings from the Los Angeles County Superior Court and conducted in-depth interviews with two dozen practitioners.
Their findings — that restricting secret settlements caused little movement in the number of case filings and didn’t appear to have a significant impact on the complexity or length of litigation — suggests that settlements happen even without the cloak of secrecy.
The Civil Justice Scholarship Award recognizes current, scholarly legal research and writing focused on topics in civil justice, including access to justice and the benefits of the U.S. civil justice system, as well as the right to trial by jury in civil cases. Northwestern University School of Law Professor Myriam Gilles is the award’s other recipient this year.