Bruce A. Markell is a Professor of Bankruptcy Law and Practice and the Edward Avery Harriman Lecturer in Law at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law. From 2004 to 2013, he was a United States bankruptcy judge, sitting in Nevada. From 2006 to 2013, he was also a member of the Bankruptcy Appellate Panel for the Ninth Circuit.
He attended the King Hall School of Law at the University of California, Davis, where he was editor-in-chief of the law review and recipient of the School of Law Medal. After law school, he clerked for then-judge Anthony M. Kennedy on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Before taking the bench, Professor Markell practiced bankruptcy and business law in Los Angeles for ten years (where he was a partner at Sidley & Austin), and was a law professor for fourteen.
He is the author of numerous articles on bankruptcy and commercial law, and a co-author of four law school casebooks. He contributes to Collier on Bankruptcy, and is a member of Collier’s editorial advisory board. He has been a visiting professor at, among other schools, Peking University School of Law in Beijing, and Harvard Law School.
In addition to being a conferee of the National Bankruptcy Conference, he is a fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy, a founding member of the International Insolvency Institute, and a life member of the American Law Institute. He also served as a Commissioner for the American Bankruptcy Institutes Commission on Consumer Bankruptcy, where he served as the Chair of Case Administration and the Estate Committee.
He was the 2022 recipient of the Commercial Law League of America’s Lawrence King Award.
In 2016, he completed a project redrafting Kosovo’s bankruptcy law. He has consulted with the International Monetary Fund on insolvency-related issues (having been part of the IMF’s missions to Ireland, Bosnia, Montenegro, Serbia, Belarus, Georgia, and Greece).