Terence Halliday is a Senior Research Fellow with the American Bar Foundation in Chicago, where he focuses his research on the globalization of law in markets and politics. The research on law and markets uses the area of corporate bankruptcy law to learn how global norms are formulated and what mechanisms and impediments exist that affect their incorporation into the national legal systems of China, Indonesia and Korea. The research on politics involves the study of ways that the legal complex (e.g., lawyers, judges, prosecutors, law faculty) either contribute to the advance of political liberalism or help defend against its decline. Dr. Halliday received his B.A. degree in history and education and an M.A. (with honors) from Massey University in New Zealand, an M.A. in sociology from the University of Toronto, and his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago.

Heidi M. Hurd is the David C. Baum Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois, where she also serves as the Co-Director of the Program in Law and Philosophy at the College of Law. Dr. Hurd served as the College of Law’s 11th dean from 2002 through 2007. She spent most of her career as a Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and co-founded and directed the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Law and Philosophy. Before coming to Illinois, she was the Herzog Research Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Institute for Law and Philosophy at the University of San Diego Law School. Dr. Hurd is the author of Moral Combat (1999), which has been widely reviewed and translated into multiple languages. Her numerous articles in the areas of criminal law, torts, ethics, and legal philosophy have appeared in the nation's top law and philosophy journals, and she is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Law and Philosophy (Kluwer Press). Dr. Hurd received her B.A. from Queen's University, her M.A. from Dalhousie University, and both her J.D. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Southern California.

Brian Knutson is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Stanford University, where his research focuses on the neural basis of emotion. It is his belief that a certain class of neurotransmitters (the biogenic amines) can powerfully modulate emotional experience at specific brain locations. Dr. Knutson addresses this topic with progressively more intricate methods, including self-support, measurement of nonverbal behavior, comparative ethology, psychopharmacology and functional brain imaging. His long-term goal is to understand the neurochemical and neuroanatomical mechanisms responsible for emotional experience and to explore the implications of these findings for the assessment and treatment of clinical disorders of affect and addiction, as well as economic behavior. Dr. Knutson received B.A. degrees in experimental psychology and comparative religion from Trinity University and his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Stanford University. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Dr. Knutson did a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience at UCSF Medical School.

Stephen Lea is a Professor of Psychology and Head of the School of Psychology at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. Professor Lea’s research focuses on animal behavior and on various aspects of economic psychology, including the relations of psychology to economics and cognate disciplines, psychological measurements of utility, psychological impacts of the tourist industry, and the psychology of debt and poverty. Professor Lea is a member of the editorial boards for the Journal of Economic Psychology, Behavior and Philosophy, Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour, Learning Behavior and the Journal of Socio-Economics. He is also an Academician of the Social Sciences, a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and a founding member of the International Association for Research in Economic Psychology. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Cambridge.

Gerry McNamara is an Associate Professor of Management at the Broad College of Business at Michigan State University, where his research focuses on examining the effects of behavioral factors, organizational practices and strategic positioning on organizational decision-making and risk taking. His research also examines the consequences of socially constructed market boundaries on firm positioning and performance. Dr. McNamara's research has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, The Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science and the Journal of International Business Studies. His research on hypercompetition in markets was honored by Emerald Management Reviews as one of the top-50 articles published in 2003, and his presentation on risk in emerging markets was judged to be one of the five best papers presented at the 2000 Strategic Management Society Conference. Dr. McNamara serves on the editorial boards of Organization Science and the Strategic Management Journal and regularly reviews for several other leading journals.Dr. McNamara received his B.A. in Business Administration and his M.B.A. from the University of San Diego and his Ph.D. in strategic management from the University of Minnesota.

J. Craig Muldrew is a member of the History Faculty at the Queens’ College of the University of Cambridge.  Dr. Muldrew’s research has focused primarily on investigating the economic and social role of trust in the development of the market economy in England between 1500-1700, concentrating on the centrality of reputation to financial credit and the insecurity of wealth in a world of innumerable debts. In this work he has examined the relationship between the actual working of economic contracts and obligations in relation to the development of natural law theory and commercial society. He has also written articles in the field of legal history concerning debt litigation and its relationship to the nature of community, as well as articles on the cultural nature of money and wages in the early modern period. His current project involves examining the development of the concept of self-control and its effect on the structure of community as well as how banks came to be trusted in eighteenth century  England.  Dr. Muldrew received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Alberta and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge.

George Ritzer is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. He has published books in metatheory, (Sociology: A Multiple Paradigm Science and Metatheorizing in Sociology) as well as the application of social theory to the social world (The McDonaldization of Society, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, The Globalization of Nothing, and Expressing America: A Critique of the Global Credit-Card Society). Sage has published two volumes of his collected works. Dr. Ritzer has edited the Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists and co-edited the Handbook of Social Theory. In addition to the Encyclopedia of Sociology, he has edited the two-volume Encyclopedia of Social Theory, and Dr. Ritzer is founding editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture.  He received his B.A. from City College of New York, his M.B.A. from the University of Michigan, and his Ph.D. in industrial and labor relations from Cornell University.

Amir Sufi is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Dr. Sufi studies the broad area of corporate finance and financial intermediation. His current research examines the role of banks in the corporate finance decisions of U.S. publicly traded corporations, with a focus on syndicated loans, revolving credit facilities, second liens, corporate liquidity, corporate investment, and the implications of bank covenants. His research has won numerous prizes, including the inaugural Young Researcher Prize from the Review of Financial Studies and the NASDAQ Award for the best paper on capital formation at the Western Finance Association. Sufi has articles in the Journal of Finance and forthcoming in the Review of Financial Studies. Dr. Sufi graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University with a bachelor's degree in economics magna cum laude, and he received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Teresa A. Sullivan is Provost, Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. Dr. Sullivan’s research focuses on labor force demography, with particular emphasis on economic marginality and consumer debt. The author or co-author of six books and more than 50 scholarly articles, her most recent work explores the question of who files for bankruptcy and why. She is currently involved in a project to collect data from a sample of debtors who filed for bankruptcy after the enactment of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. These data will be compared with earlier studies conducted in 1981, 1991, and 2001. Dr. Sullivan has served as chair of the U.S. Census Advisory Committee, and she is past secretary of the American Sociological Association and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A graduate of James Madison College at Michigan State University, Dr. Sullivan received her doctoral degree in sociology from the University of Chicago.

Paul M. Vaaler is an Associate Professor of International Business and a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Integrative Leadership at the Carlson School of Management of the University of Minnesota. Dr. Vaaler’s current research examines emerging-market country elections and foreign investment, country groups and foreign direct investment, privatizing enterprise valuation and performance, risk and capital structure in project finance, dynamic competition in technology industries, and corporate affiliation and business performance. Dr. Vaaler is an expert in risk and investment in emerging-market countries, political business cycles, and performance trends in technology industries and firms. His books include Creative Destruction: Business Survival and Success in the Global Internet Economy and Financial Innovations and the Welfare of Nations: How Cross-Border Transfers of Financial Innovations Nurture Emerging Capital Markets. Dr. Vaaler received his B.A. magna cum laude in history from Carleton College, his M.A. in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University, his J.D. from Harvard Law School, and his Ph.D. in strategic management and organization from the University of Minnesota.

Elizabeth Warren is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Her research focuses on empirical and policy work in bankruptcy and commercial law, financially distressed companies, and women, the elderly and the working poor in bankruptcy. She is the coauthor with her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi of the best-seller All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan. Her earlier book (with Tyagi) The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke has been cited by senators and presidential candidates, and her earlier award-winning books include The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt (with Sullivan & Westbrook), As We Forgive Our Debtors: Consumer Credit and Bankruptcy in America (with Sullivan & Westbrook), and three leading law-school casebooks. Warren is a member of the National Bankruptcy Conference, a past Vice President of the American Law Institute, and she served as the Reporter for the National Bankruptcy Review Commission’s study of the federal bankruptcy laws and drafted its report to Congress. Before coming to Harvard, Professor Warren was the William A. Schnader Professor of Commercial Law at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law.  Her prior faculty appointments were at the University of Texas School of Law, the University of Houston Law Center, and Rutgers Law School. Warren received her B.S. from the University of Houston and her J.D. from Rutgers University.

Richard Wiener is a Professor of Psychology, Professor of Law, and Director of the Law and Psychology Program at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Dr. Wiener’s research applies theories of social cognition to problems in legal decision-making. Among the topic areas he has investigated are perceptions of sexual harassment, judgments of medical malpractice and socio-legal jurisprudence. One of Dr. Wiener’s current lines of research examines the role of emotion in judgments made by consumers who have filed bankruptcy. He currently serves as the editor of Law and Human Behavior, the official journal of the American Psychology/Law Society. Before coming to Nebraska, Dr. Weiner was a Professor of Psychology at Saint Louis University and most recently was Chair of the Department of Psychology at Baruch College, City University of New York. Dr. Wiener received his Masters Degree in Legal Studies from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln  and his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Houston.

Robert J. Antonio is a sociology professor at the University of Kansas, where he specializes in social theory, macroscopic sociology, and economy and society. His writings have focused on Marx, the Frankfurt School, Weber, Dewey, Habermas and others in the classical and continental tradition. Among his publications are Marx & Modernity (2002), After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism (2000), A New Global Capitalism? From “Americanism and Fordism” to “Americanization-Globalization” (with A. Bonanno, 2000), Karl Marx (1999), Mapping Postmodern Social Theory (1998) and Nietzsche’s Antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End of History (1995). Dr. Antonio’s work has focused on the "modern social theory" tradition and its core problem of modernization, which has been debated intensely, subjected to anti-modern critiques and entwined with the most important political and cultural crises and conflicts of the last two centuries. He is working on debates over globalization and about resource usage, global warming and environmental problems, anti-capitalist and anti-Western socio-political movements, and the consequent geopolitical conflicts and realignments that have put into question the sustainability of liberal democracy and capitalism..

Edward J. Balleisen is an Associate Professor of History at Duke University, where his research explores the evolving "culture of American capitalism" - the institutions, values and practices that both structure and limit commercial activity. He studies the shifting meanings of "success" and "failure" in America's business culture and the intersections among economic, legal, social and cultural change. Dr. Balleisen has completed a major study of individual bankruptcy in nineteenth-century America entitled, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America, and has recently turned his attention to the history of commercial fraud in the United States, especially organizational fraud against consumer and investors from the early nineteenth century to the present, focusing on evolving mechanisms of business "self-regulation." Dr. Balleisen received his B.A. from Princeton University and his M.Phil. and Ph.D. in history from Yale University.

Curtis Bridgeman is the James Edmund and Margaret Elizabeth Corry Professor of Law at Florida State University College of Law, where his scholarship explores the structure and philosophy of contracts, commercial, and bankruptcy law. Prior to entering law teaching Dr. Bridgeman clerked in Nashville, Tennessee for the Honorable Gilbert Merritt of the Sixth Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals.  Dr. Bridgeman received his B.A. from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, his M.A., his Ph.D. in philosophy, and his J.D. from Vanderbilt University. He won numerous awards in law school, including the Bennett Douglas Bell Memorial Award, the only student award voted by the entire faculty at Vanderbilt Law School. He also served as an Articles Editor for the Vanderbilt Law Review.

Yuliya Demyanyk is an Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and is also a Lecturer in Economics at Washington University in St. Louis. At the Federal Reserve, she does supervisory policy analysis in the Banking Supervision and Regulation division. Her research focuses on analysis of the subprime mortgage market, on the roles that financial intermediation and banking regulation play in the U.S. economy, and on analysis of financial integration in the United States as well as in the European Union. She has articles published in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of International Money and Finance, the Journal of Economics and Business, and several Federal Reserve publications. She received her B.S. and M.A. in physics from the National University of Odessa in the Ukraine, her M.A. in economics from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in the Ukraine, and her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Houston.

Celia Hayhoe is an Assistant Professor and Family Resource Management Extension Specialist at Virginia Tech. Her research interests include college students' use of credit, money and credit attitudes, estate planning, and savings behavior. She is a past President of the National Association of Financial Counseling and Planning. Dr. Hayhoe is certified by the College for Financial Planning and received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from the University of Arizona.

Ming Hsu is a Beckman Fellow at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is an assistant professor in the Economics Department. Previously he was a Ph.D. student at the California Institute of Technology. His background is primarily in the interdisciplinary areas of behavioral economics (economics and psychology) and neuroeconomics (economics and neuroscience), allowing him to bring a variety of models and methods to study the relevant questions, including behavioral and field experiments, as well as neuroimaging and neuropsychological data. Prof. Hsu’s research goal is to understand a diverse array of individual and social decision-making processes, and he has previously studied decision-making under risk and ambiguity, nonlinear weighting of probabilities, moral decision-making, and price formation in double auction markets. His future research includes translating these and other findings to applied domains, such as how decision-making changes over age and environments..

Kevin Leicht is a Professor of Sociology and a founding Co-Director of the Center for Inequality Studies at the University of Iowa.  Dr, Leicht’s research interests include sociology of work, organizations and organization theory, social stratification, and political sociology. His current research is examining gender inequality among professionals, transaction-cost approaches to career decision-making, the development of economic development programs by the U.S. states, and the causes and consequences of corporate restructuring.  He has authored or co-authored four books and dozens of scholarly articles and is an elected member of the Sociological Research Association. Dr. Leicht received his B.S. in sociology and psychology from Creighton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Indiana University.

Hon. Bruce Markell is a Bankruptcy Judge for the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Nevada in Las Vegas and a Senior Fellow in Bankruptcy and Commercial Law at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Prior to taking the bench, Judge Markell was the Doris S. and Theodore B. Lee Professor of Law at UNLV. Before coming to UNLV, Markell was on the faculty at the Indiana University School of Law in Bloomington. Judge Markell is the author of numerous articles on bankruptcy and commercial law. He is a member of the editorial board of Collier on Bankruptcy and contributes several chapters to that publication. Other publications include the books Making and Doing Deals: Contracts in Context; Core Concepts of Commercial Law: Past, Present, & Future; and Securitization, Structured Finance and Capital Markets. Judge Markell is a member of the National Bankruptcy Conference and he currently serves on its Executive Committee and is chair of its Capital Markets Committee. He is also a member of the American Law Institute and a fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy. Judge Markell has served as an advisor on bankruptcy and secured transaction reform to the Republic of Indonesia, was the International Bar Association's representative to UNCITRAL's creation of a model law on the assignment of international receivables, and was asked by the United Nations to be an expert consultant to its project to create a legislative guide for secured transactions. Judge Markell graduated first in his class at the King Hall School of Law, University of California at Davis, where he was also editor-in-chief of its law review.

Steven Schwarcz is the Stanley A. Star Professor of Law & Business at Duke University, where his main areas of scholarship are commercial law, bankruptcy, and international finance and capital markets. Professor Schwarz brings the unique perspective of having been a leading practitioner as well as a scholar. Prior to joining the Duke faculty, he was a partner at the law firm of Shearman & Sterling and then a partner and practice group chairman at Kaye Scholer LLP, representing many of the world's leading banks and other financial institutions in structuring innovative capital market financing transactions, both domestic and international. Professor Schwarcz also has been an adviser to the United Nations on international receivables financing and a member of the U.S. Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on Private International Law. Professor Schwarcz received his B.S. summa cum laude in aeronautics and astronautics from New York University School of Engineering and Science and his J.D. from Columbia Law School.

David A. Skeel is the S. Samuel Arsht Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in Philadelphia, where he teaches bankruptcy and corporate labor law. He is the author of Icarus in the Boardroom (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Debt's Dominion: A History of Bankruptcy Law in America (Princeton University Press, 2001), as well as numerous articles and other publications. Prof. Skeel has been interviewed on "Nightline," "Chris Matthews' Hardball" (MS-NBC), National Public Radio and "Marketplace," among others, and has been quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and many other publications. Prof. Skeel has twice received the Harvey Levin award for outstanding teaching, as selected by a vote of the graduating class as well as the University's Lindback Award for distinguished teaching. In addition to corporate law and bankruptcy, he also writes on sovereign debt, law and religion, and poetry and the law. Prof. Skeel served as ABI's Robert M. Zinman Resident Scholar for the the Fall 2006 semester. He received his B.A. From the University of North Carolina in 1983 and his J.D. From the University of Virginia in 1987.

Thomas S. Ulen holds the university-level Swanlund Chair and is the Director of the Illinois Program in Law and Economics at the University of Illinois. where he has faculty appointments in the College of Law, the Department of Economics, the Institute for Government and Public Affairs, and the Campus Honors Program and is a research affiliate of the Environmental Council. Dr. Ulen is internationally renowned as one of the “founding fathers” of the transformative law and economics movement. His seminal text, Law and Economics (with Robert Cooter), now in its fifth edition, has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Korean, French, and Russian. Dr. Ulen’s scholarship examines a variety of issues related to economics, legal scholarship, and legal education. He has recently completed work on two new books, Cognition, Rationality, and the Law (with Russell Korobkin, University of Chicago Press) and Foundations of Environmental Policy (with John B. Braden, Edward Elgar Publishers). A prolific writer and researcher, he has contributed four entries — on regulation generally, quantity regulation, price regulation, and quality regulation — for the Oxford Economic History of the United States. Dr. Ulen received his B.A. from Dartmouth College, his M.A. from Oxford University, and his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, and he was recently awarded a doctorate honoris causa by Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

Ralph Brubaker is Interim Dean, Professor of Law, and the Guy Raymond Jones Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois College of Law, where his scholarship explores the complex jurisdictional and procedural facets of federal bankruptcy proceedings. Dean Brubaker is co-author of Bankruptcy Law: Principles, Policies, and Practice, now in its second edition (with Charles J. Tabb, LexisNexis), and he is currently at work on the second edition of The Law of Bankruptcy (with Tabb, Foundation Press). Dean Brubaker is the editor-in-chief and a regular contributing author of the Bankruptcy Law Letter (Thomson West), and he is a member of the editorial advisory board for the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review. He serves on the executive committee of the board of directors for the American Bankruptcy Institute and is a member of the advisory board for the St. John's University School of Law, Bankruptcy LL.M. Program. Before joining the Illinois law faculty, Brubaker spent the bulk of his academic career with the faculty of Emory University School of Law, where he was the scholarly advisor to the Emory Bankruptcy Developments Journal. Dean Brubaker received his B.S. with highest honors, his M.BA. and his J.D. summa cum laude from the University of Illinois, where he was elected Order of the Coif, a Harno Fellow and served as articles editor for the University of Illinois Law Review.

Cynthea E. Geerdes is the Assistant Dean for Clinical Education at the University of Illinois College of Law where she is recognized as Founder and Director of the Transactions and Community Economic Development Clinic; which focuses on issues of economic justice. The Transactions Clinic is unique in its approach to providing low-income clients with needed legal assistance. The Clinic not only represents individual consumers in financial matters, but it is also deeply involved with promoting asset accumulation among the working poor and developing positive alternatives to high-cost financing. In addition, the Clinic assists clients in starting and growing their small businesses and not-for-profit tax-exempt corporations. Professor Geerdes is the editor-in-chief of the American Bar Association's Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law. She is a member of the Campus Advisory Committee of the East St. Louis Action Research Project, a multi-disciplinary service learning project of the University of Illinois. She is also active in several community programs that focus on asset building among the low-income population. Dean Geerdes received her B.A. from Calvin College her J.D. from New York University .

Robert M. Lawless is a Professor of Law and the Galowich-Huzienga Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois College of Law. Professor Lawless is a nationally acclaimed expert in bankruptcy and corporate law and has published numerous scholarly articles in those fields. Professor Lawless is intensely interested in empirical legal studies and interdisciplinary studies in business law. Professor Lawless is one of six regular contributors to the blog, Credit Slips, a discussion on credit and bankruptcy. He is also a member of the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, a long-term empirical project studying persons who file bankruptcy. Prior to joining the Illinois law faculty, Professor Lawless held faculty appointments at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law and the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law. He is a member of the American Law Institute and serves on the board of directors for the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI). He has served on the editorial board for the American Bankruptcy Law Journal and is currently on the editorial advisory board for the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review. Professor Lawless received his B.S. with highest honors and his J.D. summa cum laude from the University of Illinois, where he served as editor in chief of the University of Illinois Law Review.

Charles J. Tabb is the Alice Curtis Campbell Professor of Law at the University of Illinois College of Law, where he is recognized as one of the nation’s leading bankruptcy scholars, specializing in bankruptcy, contracts and commercial law. Dean Tabb has published three books and more than two dozen articles on bankruptcy law. His most recent book is Bankruptcy Law: Principles, Policies & Practice, in its second edition (with Ralph Brubaker, LexisNexis), and he is currently at work on the second edition of The Law of Bankruptcy (with Brubaker, Foundation Press). On the appointment of former Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Dean Tabb served on the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure of the Judicial Conference of the United States, and on the appointment of former Illinois Governor Jim Edgar, he was a Commissioner for the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. Dean Tabb advised the National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China on the 2007 reform of the Chinese bankruptcy law. He is a member of the American Law Institute and is a fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy. Dean Tabb received his B.A. from Vanderbilt University and his J.D. summa cum laude from the University of Virginia.