Secured Transactions: A Systems Approach, Ninth Edition

Lynn M. LoPucki

Lynn M. LoPucki teaches Business Associations, Secured Transactions, and Comparative Corporate Law. He founded the UCLA-LoPucki Bankruptcy Research Database (BRD) in 1994 and continues to direct it. The BRD collects data on large, public company bankruptcies and disseminates it to bankruptcy researchers throughout the world.

LoPucki is an empiricist who writes on a wide variety of subjects. His current project, Repurposing the Corporation, is about corporate purpose and social responsibility. His book, Business Associations: A Systems Approach (forthcoming Aspen Casebook Series 2020) (with Andrew Verstein), will be the first business associations casebook to be organized functionally rather than by entity type. His most recently published articles have been on methodology in comparative corporation law (A Rule-Based Method for Comparing Corporate Laws), regulatory competition among the states to sell corporate charters (Corporate Charter Competition), and charter competition as an accelerant of the threat to humanity from artificial intelligence (Algorithmic Entities). LoPucki has written on legal strategy, court system transparency, the application of systems analysis in law, and the impact of judgment-proofing on civil liability. He has published empirical studies on the bankruptcy system, the UCC filing system, the law faculty hiring system, and other subjects.

BRD data provided the foundation for two of Professor LoPucki’s books, Courting Failure: How Competition for Big Cases is Corrupting the Bankruptcy Courts (University of Michigan Press, 2005) and Professional Fees in Corporate Bankruptcies: Data, Analysis, and Evaluation (Oxford University Press, 2011) (with Joseph Doherty). His writings have been published in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, University of Michigan Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Duke Law Journal and Northwestern University Law Review and many others. VisiLaw, a system developed by LoPucki for marking statutes to make them easier to read, was nominated for an HIIL Innovating Justice Award in 2012. Two annual statutory supplements are now published with VisiLaw markings.

Professor LoPucki uses an empirically based systems approach for policy analysis. He has 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. Professor LoPucki is co-author of two widely used law school casebooks: Secured Transactions: A Systems Approach (with Elizabeth Warren and Robert M. Lawless, 9th edition, 2020) and Commercial Transactions: A Systems Approach (with Elizabeth Warren, Daniel L. Keating, and Ronald Mann, 7th edition, 2020); a leading practice manual: Strategies for Creditors in Bankruptcy Proceedings (with Christopher R. Mirick, 6th edition, 2015); 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—has been featured in casebooks in several fields. He is a member of the American College of Bankruptcy and the International Insolvency Institute.

Professor LoPucki was a member of the Cornell Law School faculty before coming to UCLA in 1999.

Robert M. Lawless

Professor Robert Lawless specializes in bankruptcy, consumer credit, and business law. He is intensely interested in empirical legal studies and interdisciplinary work. In addition to a course in empirical methods, he teaches in the areas of bankruptcy and commercial law.

Professor Lawless is one of seven regular contributors to the blog Credit Slips, a discussion on credit and bankruptcy. He also is a member of the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, a long-term empirical project studying persons who file bankruptcy. The latest report from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project received the 2009 Editor's Prize from the American Bankruptcy Law Journal. Professor Lawless has testified before Congress, and his work has been featured in media outlets such as CNN, CNBC, the New York Times, USA Today, the National Law Journal, the L.A. Times, the Financial Times, and Money magazine.

Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard University and the senior United States Senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. While in teaching, she twice won the Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching Excellence at Harvard Law School, as well as other teaching prizes at the University of Houston, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania. She has written ten 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. Warren served as Chief Adviser to the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. She also served as Vice-President of the American Law Institute, and she has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. During the financial crisis, Warren was the Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, and she later served as Adviser to the President and Special Adviser to the Secretary of the Treasury to set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.