Lynn M. LoPucki

Lynn M. LoPucki teaches Business Associations, Secured Transactions, and Bankruptcy Empiricism. 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.

BRD data provided the foundation for Professor LoPucki’s two most recent 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 numerous journals, including 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. 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.

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

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.

LoPucki is co-author of two widely used law school casebooks: Secured Credit: A Systems Approach (with Elizabeth Warren and Robert M. Lawless, 8th edition, 2016) and Commercial Transactions: A Systems Approach (with Elizabeth Warren, Daniel L. Keating, and Ronald Mann, 5th edition, 2012); 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 – is featured in casebooks in several fields. He is a member of the American College of Bankruptcy and the International Insolvency Institute.