Judge Bruce A. Markell

Biography

Bruce A. Markell has been a bankruptcy judge since 2004, and a member of the Ninth Circuit's Bankruptcy Appellate Panel since 2007.  He came to the bench from the academy; since 1999, he had been the Doris S. and Theodore B. Lee Professor of Law at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he taught Contracts, Commercial Law, Securitization and Bankruptcy.  He maintains a position at the Boyd School of Law as their Senior Fellow in Bankruptcy and Commercial Law.

Judge Markell is a 1977 graduate of Pitzer College, and a 1980 graduate of the King Hall School of Law, University of California at Davis, where he was first in his class and editor-in-chief of the law review.  Following graduation, he clerked for then-judge Anthony M. Kennedy when Justice Kennedy was a member of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  Before becoming an academic in 1990, he was a partner in the Los Angeles office of Sidley & Austin, specializing in workouts and bankruptcy matters.   From 1990 to 1999, he taught at the Indiana University School of Law - Bloomington.  During 1999, he was the Bruce W. Nichols Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.  He has also visited at Emory University School of Law and King Hall School of Law at the University of California at Davis.  While an academic, he served in an "Of Counsel" capacity to Ancel & Dunlap (Indianapolis, 1996-2000) and Stutman, Treister & Glatt, Professional Corporation (Los Angeles, 2001-2004).

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.  In 2001, he published a casebook on Contracts, Making and Doing Deals: Contracts in Context, with Professor David Epstein and Dean Lawrence Ponoroff; a second edition of that book was published in 2006, and a third edition is scheduled for 2010.  In 2004, he published Core Concepts of Commercial Law: Past, Present & Future, a commercial law casebook with Professor John Dolan and Dean Larry Ponoroff, and Securitization, Structured Finance and Capital Markets, a set of teaching materials on securitization, with Professors Steven L. Schwarcz and Lissa Broome.  Securitization is scheduled to be translated into Japanese in 2010.  In early 2005, he published another casebook, Bankruptcy: 21st Century Debtor-Creditor Law, with David Epstein, Steve Nickles and Elizabeth Perris; due to the enactment of BAPCPA, a second edition was published in late 2005, and a third edition is scheduled for 2010.

In 1999 he was elected a conferee of the National Bankruptcy Conference, in 1997 he was selected as a member of the American Law Institute, and in 2000 he was selected as a member of the International Insolvency Institute and as a fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy. 

He has served as an advisor on bankruptcy and secured transaction reform to the Republic of Indonesia, was the International Bar Association's representative to the sessions of United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) that lead to the creation of UNCITRAL's model law on the assignment of international receivables.  He was also asked by the United Nations to be an expert consultant to its project to create a legislative guide for secured transactions.