About the Authors
Lynn M. LoPucki
Lynn M. LoPucki is the Security Pacific Bank Professor of Law at the UCLA Law School, and, each fall semester, the Bruce W. Nichols Visiting Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School. LoPucki teaches Secured Transactions and Empirical Analysis of Law at both schools.
LoPucki has engaged in empirical research on large public company bankruptcies for the past twenty-five years and has been quoted in several hundred news articles on the topic in just the past five. His Bankruptcy Research Database http://lopucki.law.ucla.edu provides data for much, if not most, empirical work on the topic. LoPucki’s book, Courting Failure: How Competition for Big Cases Is Corrupting the Bankruptcy Courts (University of Michigan Press 2005) shocked the bankruptcy world with empirical evidence regarding the effects of forum shopping and court competition. The debate over those allegations has dominated recent scholarship in the field. LoPucki and his frequent coauthor, Joseph W. Doherty, are currently working on another book, Controlling Professional Fees in Corporate Bankruptcies, under contract with Oxford University Press.
LoPucki uses an empirically-based systems approach for policy analysis. He has recently proposed public identities as the solution to identify theft, court system transparency as the solution to judicial bias, and an effective filing system as the solution to the deceptive nature of secured credit.
LoPucki is co-author of two widely used casebooks: Secured Credit: A Systems Approach (5th edition, with Elizabeth Warren, 2006) and Commercial Transactions: A Systems Approach (with Warren, Keating, and Mann, 4th edition, 2009). He also co-wrote a leading practice manual: Strategies for Creditors in Bankruptcy Proceedings (with Christopher R. Mirick, 5th edition, 2007) and a popular series of bankruptcy procedure flow charts: Bankruptcy Visuals. LoPucki’s Death of Liability thesis—propounded in a Yale Law Journal article in 1996—is featured in casebooks in several fields.
Education
B.A. University of Michigan, 1965
J.D. University of Michigan, 1967
LL.M. Harvard, 1970
Elizabeth Warren
Professor Elizabeth Warren is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard University, where she won the Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching Excellence. Students have also awarded Elizabeth Warren teaching prizes at University of Houston, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. She has written eight books and more than a hundred scholarly articles dealing with credit and economic stress. Warren has been a principal investigator on empirical studies funded by the National Science Foundation and more than a dozen private foundations. She served as Vice-President of the American Law Institute, and she has been inducted into the American Academic of Arts and Sciences. Warren was the Chief Adviser to the National Bankruptcy Review Commission, and she was appointed by Chief Justice Rehnquist as the first academic member of the Federal Judicial Education Committee. She currently serves as a member of the Commission on Economic Inclusion established by the FDIC. She has testified several times before House and the Senate committees on financial issues. The National Law Journal has repeatedly named Professor Warren as one of the Fifty Most Influential Women Attorneys in America.
EDUCATION
University of Houston B.S. 1970
Rutgers University J.D. 1976
