Judge Clark has served as a bankruptcy judge for the Western District of Texas since 1987. During his tenure on the bench, he has authored well over 200 opinions, some of which have been seminal decisions on emerging issues in both consumer and business bankruptcy. In addition, he has published scholarly articles in law reviews, including a series of articles on bankruptcy jurisprudence in the Fifth Circuit from 1995 through 2002 in the Texas Tech University Law Review. For many years, Judge Clark also authored a monthly column offering a judicial perspective on legal and practice issues in the ABI Journal. He also testified before the National Bankruptcy Review Commission regarding Article III issues relating to bankruptcy. Judge Clark has been a frequent lecturer on bankruptcy issues at seminars nationwide, speaking on a wide range of bankruptcy issues, both consumer and business-related. In addition, he served as a director and officer of the American Bankruptcy Institute for many years and was instrumental in the formation of that organization’s Endowment Committee to fund bankruptcy research. He currently serves as a member of the Endowment Board for the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges.
Teaching has always been an important part of Judge Clark’s professional career. For sixteen years, he taught American Constitutional Law to foreign students as part of the International Master of Laws Program for McGeorge School of Law, teaching in Salzburg, Austria. He also helped to design and then administer a judicial training program for USAID, training judges in Poland, Romania, Latvia, and the Ukraine. He has also taught both basic and advanced courses in bankruptcy law for the University of Texas School of Law as an adjunct professor.
Judge Clark has also been privileged to participate in the development of international insolvency regimes, serving as part of the advisory committee to the U.S. delegation to UNCITRAL’s drafting of the Model Cross Border Insolvency Law. In addition, he served on the ABA’s delegation to UNCITRAL as it developed its legislative guide for insolvency law, participating in working group sessions in Vienna, Austria. He also was an active participant in the working group that developed the Transnational Insolvency Guide for ALI-ABA.
Before attending law school at the University of Houston School of Law (where he graduated with honors and was a published editor on that school’s law review), he served in specialized ministries for the American Lutheran Church, after graduating from the Evangelical Lutheran Theological Seminar (now Trinity Lutheran Seminary) in Columbus, Ohio, where he obtained a master of divinity degree. He completed his undergraduate work with honors at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland.
Judge Clark takes special pride in what he deems his most important accomplishments – his son, Harrison (born in 2003) and his daughter, Carson Renee (born in early 2006).