Stanley A. Star Professor of Law & Business

Steven L. Schwarcz is the Stanley A. Star Professor of Law & Business at Duke University and Founding Director of Duke’s interdisciplinary Global Capital Markets Center (now renamed the Global Financial Markets Center). His areas of research and scholarship include insolvency and bankruptcy law; international finance, capital markets, and systemic risk; and commercial law. (Links to his scholarship are at http://law.duke.edu/fac/schwarcz/.) Prior to joining the Duke faculty, he was a partner at two leading international law firms, where he represented top banks and other financial institutions in structuring innovative capital market financing transactions, both domestic and international. He also helped to pioneer the field of asset securitization, and his book, Structured Finance, A Guide to the Principles of Asset Securitization (3d edition), is one of the most widely used texts in the field.

Professor Schwarcz has been the Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford, Visiting Professor at the University of Geneva Faculty of Law, Senior Fellow at The University of Melbourne Law School, and an adviser to the United Nations. He has given numerous endowed or distinguished public lectures, including at The University of Hong Kong, the University of Oxford (the Leverhulme Lectures 2010, available at http://www.law.ox.ac.uk/published/leverhulme2010.php), Georgetown University Law Center, National University of Singapore, and The National Assembly of the Republic of Korea. He has served as an expert at meetings of the World Economic Forum. He also has given numerous keynote speeches, including at annual conferences of the European Central Bank, the Corporate Law Teachers Association of Australia, New Zealand, and Asia-Pacific, Moody’s Corporation, and the Asian Securitisation Forum.

Additionally, Professor Schwarcz has testified before the U.S. Congress on topics including systemic risk, securitization, credit rating agencies, and financial regulation and has advised several U.S. and foreign governmental agencies on the financial crisis and shadow banking. His writings include Systemic Risk, 97 Georgetown Law Journal 193, the second most cited law review article of 2008. He is also a Fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy, a Founding Member of the International Insolvency Institute, a Fellow of the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers, and Business Law Advisor to the American Bar Association Section on Business Law.

Recent Activities

• Keynote Speaker, Peking University Economic Law Lectures (December 11, 2012). (Lecture one, lecture two, lecture three)
• Firestarter and Expert, World Economic Forum, Industry Partnership Strategies Meeting 2012 (October 3, 2012).
• Framing Address, Berle IV Symposium, “Rethinking Financial Markets,” University College London (June 14, 2012).
• Keynote Address, European Central Bank conference, Regulation of Financial Services in the EU (October 20, 2011).
• Leverhulme Visiting Professorship, University of Oxford (Michaelmas Term 2010) and Leverhulme Lectures 2010, University of Oxford.
• Distinguished Public Lecture, The National Assembly of the Republic of Korea (April 30, 2010).
• Keynote Plenary Address, 2010 Annual Conference, Corporate Law Teachers Association of Australia, New Zealand, and Asia-Pacific (February 8, 2010).