Joshua Macey

JOSH is an assistant professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School and specializes in bankruptcy law, energy law and the regulation of financial institutions. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg’s “Money Stuff,” and he has appeared or is forthcoming in Joule, the Stanford Law Review, Penn Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Michigan Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, Texas Law Review and Yale Journal on Regulation. Previously, he worked at Morgan Stanley and clerked for Hon. J. Harvie Wilkinson III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He also was a visiting assistant professor of law and a post-doctoral associate at Cornell Law School.

In the past three years, Josh has defended bankruptcy as a means of resolving mass tort cases, suggested reforms to bankruptcy venue-selection rules that would preserve socially valuable venue-shopping while reducing opportunistic venue-shopping, and considered when and under what circumstances parties should be able to contract out of the bankruptcy system. The papers he has written on these subjects all analyze legal and market developments that create collective action problems, and they offer proposals about how bankruptcy law should respond to those problems. He has presented these papers at more than a dozen conferences. He also has authored amicus briefs about the use of third-party releases and divisional mergers. He hopes to continue to participate in active litigation in the coming years and is trying to become more active in international reorganization debates. To that end, he has spoken at the Asian Development Bank about emerging international competition for bankruptcy cases and plans to become more involved with INSOL.

Josh first started writing about bankruptcy law when he began reading first-day motions for coal company bankruptcies in 2017. That interest led him to write a law review article on the relationship between bankruptcy law and corporate law. Since then, he considers himself fortunate to work with people who have spent more time than he has in the field, and he has tried to bridge the divide between scholarship and practice by authoring amicus briefs in order to communicate his theoretical work with judges and practitioners, and by presenting his work in popular forums such as the Harvard Bankruptcy Roundtable and in opinion pages. He serves as the faculty advisor to the University of Chicago Business Law Review, organized a conference celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Frank Easterbrook and Dan Fischel’s “The Economic Structure of Corporate Law,” and served on the University of Chicago Law School’s appointments committee.