Colton Cronin is a fifth-year student in the Ph.D. Program in Law and Economics at Vanderbilt Law School. His research focuses on aggregate litigation, employment law, and access to justice. Colton served as the Senior Articles Editor for the Vanderbilt Law Review where he led the Article Selections Committee. He has worked as a Research Assistant for Professor Joni Hersch since 2019. In the summer of 2023, he was an Equal Justice Works Summer Fellow at West Tennessee Legal Services. He was a Summer Associate at Bernabei & Kabat, PLLC in Washington, D.C. in 2025. Colton has volunteered with the Tennessee Justice Center, the Shade Tree Clinic Medical-Legal Partnership, and the Tennessee Supreme Court Access to Justice Commission.

Colton earned a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Economics at Vanderbilt University. As an undergraduate, Colton served as a Teaching Assistant for Applied Econometrics and Economics of Risk courses. He was a Research Assistant for the Vanderbilt University Experimental Economics Lab and the Center on Law, Business, and Economics at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

Education:
B.A. in Mathematics and Economics with Minors in English and Scientific Computing, Vanderbilt University, 2021

Publications:

• Brian T. Fitzpatrick & Colton Cronin, “Do Representative Payments Matter? An Empirical Study,” 22 J. Empirical Legal Stud. _ (forthcoming 2025). PDF.
• Deborah M. Weiss, Matthew L. Spitzer, Colton Cronin & Neil Chin, Why College Majors and Selectivity Matter: Major Groupings, Occupation Specificity, and Job Skills, 42 Contemp. Econ. Pol’y 278 (2024). PDF
• Joni Hersch & Colton Cronin, The Charter School Network (Almost) No One Wants: Mobilizing Regulation and Litigation to Serve the Public Interest, 44 Cardozo L. Rev. 1299 (2023). PDF

Presentations:

• “The Future of Color Discrimination Protections Under Title VII,” Colloquium on Scholarship in Employment and Labor Law (September 19, 2025)
• “Do Representative Payments Matter? An Empirical Study,” Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (November 8, 2024)
• “Scoring Reversals Revisited: The Mutability of MVP Voting,” SABR Analytics Conference (March 14, 2020)