About

Charles M. Silver holds the Roy W. and Eugenia C. McDonald Endowed Chair of Civil Procedure at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. His research focuses on aggregate lawsuits, including class actions and other mass proceedings, attorneys’ fees—covering contractual compensation arrangements, common fund fee awards, and statutory fee awards—professional responsibility, and health care law and policy, with an emphasis on the payment system. He has worked with empirical researchers on studies of medical malpractice litigation in Texas for over a decade and served as an Associate Reporter on the Principles of Aggregate Litigation published by the American Law Institute in 2010. Silver teaches courses on civil procedure, health law, and professional responsibility, and has authored several publications, including books on medical malpractice litigation and health care costs.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Business
• Political Science
• Economics
• Actuarial science
• Finance
• Computer Security
• Medicine
• Law and economics
• Pharmacology
• Public economics
• Economic growth
• Public administration
• Microeconomics
• Law

Selected publications

• BETTER DRUGS AND DEVICES THROUGH PRIVATE CONTRACTS

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Improving Health Care: Affordability, Access, and Innovation

  Innovations Technology Governance Globalization · 2025-11-14

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The United States has long been Number 1 worldwide in healthcare spending.In 2023, U.S. healthcare spending totaled $4.9 trillion, or 18% of our nation's GDP.That translates into almost $15,000 per capita-double the average of other developed countries and two-thirds higher than Switzerland, the next highest spender (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 2024;Wager et al., 2025).The return on this massive investment is unimpressive, to say the least.At the population level, the U.S. consistently ranks at or near the bottom among developed nations in key health metrics, such as infant mortality, prevalence of chronic disease, life expectancy, and preventable mortality (Puthumana, Grogan, & Bai, 2025).In fairness, these metrics are affected by many factors beyond health care, and there are other performance measures on which the U.S. does better.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Blaming the messenger:  A Comment on “Private Equity and the Corporatization of Health Care” by Erin C. Fuse Brown and Mark Hall

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Leveraging Medicare: How to Deliver Affordable, High-Quality Health Care

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Third Party Litigation Funding: Panacea or More Problems?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Public administration
  PublisherDOI

• Leveraging the Medicaid Expansion

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Suspect Restitionary Basis for Common Benefit Fee Awards in Multi-District Litigations

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• In Defense of Private Claims Resolution Facilities

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This contribution to a Symposium in honor of Francis McGovern's life and accomplishments is a natural occasion on which to assess some of the normative arguments for and against private claims resolution facilities (CRFs). He was one of the most prominent figures in the world of multi-claimant litigation and settlements. We were privileged to work alongside him in various matters and to consider him a friend. We miss him dearly. The Article begins, in Part II, by describing three core models of private CRFs that are commonly observed in mass tort settings, often in combination: individual settlements by in-house counsel, victim compensation funds, and group settlements (inventory and global). Our view is that variations in the design of CRFs often have functional explanations as responses to the desires and needs of the parties. When the parties differ in their preferred arrangements, the design of a CRF will inevitably reflect inequalities in bargaining power between the parties. That is expected, as each CRF is the product of compromise. With regard to each of the three core models, this second Part will discuss when and why the defendant might prefer it, then go on to discuss its benefits and costs to the plaintiffs (and plaintiffs’ counsel). Part III then addresses two criticisms that scholars have levied against one or more of these types of private CRFs: that private CRFs deny claimants corrective justice, and that judicial supervision is needed to protect claimants’ autonomy and to police agency failures on the plaintiffs’ side. We argue that the first criticism is mistaken because it wrongly contends that corrective justice requires the use of courts, and that the second is erroneous because market forces should encourage plaintiffs’ attorneys to protect claimants’ autonomy as fully as claimants want and tend to reduce agency costs to an efficient level in multi-claimant settlements no less than in single-client matters. The Article concludes in Part IV with some final thoughts on the limited potential of judicial review to improve private CRFs.

  Publisher

• Constitutional Limits on Federal Courts' Inherent Powers: The Example of Multi-District Litigation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Regulating Health Care: Perspectives From Government Failure During the COVID-19 Pandemic

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• David A. Hyman

  Georgetown University

  99 shared

• Bernard S. Black

  Medical College of Wisconsin

  65 shared

• William M. Sage

  Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust

  41 shared

• Lynn A. Baker

  Texas A&M University School of Law

  15 shared

• Myungho Paik

  9 shared

• Kathryn Zeiler

  Boston University

  8 shared

• Mohammad Hossein Rahmati

  7 shared

• Richard W. Wright

  5 shared