Prof. Christopher D. Hampson

CHRIS is an assistant professor of law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law in Gainesville, Fla., and is a scholar of bankruptcy, insolvency and the ethics of debt. His research focuses on how legal institutions can best serve our shared values during times of financial distress, and he teaches classes on bankruptcy and contracts, and an upper-level seminar on law, religion and the ethics of debt. He has written on a wide range of topics, from benefit corporations and small business bankruptcy to imprisonment for debt. His scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in prominent law reviews across the country, including the Harvard Law Review, the Fordham Law Review, the Iowa Law Review and the American Bankruptcy Law Journal. His work has also been cited by federal bankruptcy, district and appellate courts, as well as two state supreme courts.

Prior to joining UF Law, Chris practiced law at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP in Boston, where he led litigation and transactional teams as part of the firm’s bankruptcy and financial restructuring group. His bankruptcy work included blockbuster chapter 11, appellate, and Supreme Court cases, as well as a $1.6-billion securities litigation related to the Puerto Rico insolvency proceedings. He also managed a pro bono practice, through which he successfully defended Spanish-speaking clients against unlawful evictions and won an asylum case for a gay man seeking refuge in the U.S. from Uganda. Prior to joining WilmerHale, he clerked for Hon. Richard A. Posner on the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, during which time he published his first article on the history of the abolition of debtors’ prisons, which inspired a panel at UT Austin and has been cited by the Iowa Supreme Court and the Eleventh Circuit. Fluent in English and Spanish, he has spoken at numerous bankruptcy conferences, including those of ABI, ABA, NCBJ and SBLI, and he has been consulted and quoted by several newspapers, including Bloomberg Law and Politico.

Chris decided to embark upon a career in insolvency during the Great Recession, while he was an undergraduate senior at Harvard. A chance meeting with a bankruptcy professor while working at a small nonprofit in Cambridge, Mass., led him to decide that bankruptcy professionals both understood the core problems and knew something about how to fix them. He is Education Director of ABI’s Legislation Committee, an immediate goal of which is to urge Congress to reinstate the subchapter V debt limit at $7.5 million. He also serves the UF Law community as the chair of its Clerkship Committee and as the co-facilitator of its Junior Faculty Writing Workshop.