Steven Schwarcz

Steven Schwarcz is the Stanley A. Star Professor of Law & Business at Duke University. After graduating first in his class in engineering school (B.S. summa cum laude, New York University School of Engineering and Science), majoring in aeronautics and astronautics, he worked on legislative initiatives involving science and law while attending Columbia Law School (J.D. 1974). Prior to joining the Duke faculty in 1996, he was a partner at the law firm of Shearman & Sterling and then a partner and practice group chairman at Kaye Scholer LLP, where he represented many of the world's leading 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 2002), is one of the most widely used texts in the field. While practicing law, Professor Schwarcz taught at the Yale, Columbia, and Cardozo (Yeshiva University) law schools. His main areas of scholarship are commercial law, bankruptcy, and international finance and capital markets, where he brings the unique perspective of having been a leading practitioner as well as a scholar. In these inherently business dominated subjects, he works closely with colleagues at Duke's Fuqua School of Business, where he is Adjunct Professor of Business Administration. He also founded and was the first Faculty Director of Duke's interdisciplinary Global Capital Markets Center. Professor Schwarcz also has been an adviser to the United Nations on international receivables financing, a member of the U.S. Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on Private International Law, Visiting Professor at the University of Geneva Faculty of Law, and Senior Fellow at The University of Melbourne Law School. Among other honors, Schwarcz is a Fellow of the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers and Founding Member of the International Insolvency Institute. He also gave the 1996 Benjamin Weintraub Distinguished Professorship Lecture at Hofstra University School of Law and the 4th AIIFL Distinguished Public Lecture at The University of Hong Kong in 2002, and was Keynote Speaker at the 2004 Annual Conference, Corporate Law Teachers’ Association of Australia and New Zealand. He has been appointed advisor to the American Bar Association Business Law Section, 2008-2009.