Bruce A. Markell was one of four bankruptcy judges for the District of Nevada, being sworn in on July 9, 2004. He came to the bench from the academy; since 1999, he had been a professor of law at the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he taught Contracts, Commercial Law, Securitization and Bankruptcy, and where he was the the Doris S. and Theodore B. Lee Professor of Law from 2000. He was also Of Counsel to the Los Angeles law firm of Stutman, Treister & Glatt, and the Indianapolis law firm of Ancel & Dunlap.
Judge Markell is a 1977 graduate of Pitzer College, and a 1980 graduate of the King Hall School of Law, University of California at Davis, where he was first in his class and editor-in-chief of the law review. Following graduation, he clerked for then-judge Anthony M. Kennedy when Justice Kennedy was a member of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Before becoming an academic in 1990, he was a partner in the Los Angeles office of Sidley & Austin, specializing in workouts and bankruptcy matters. From 1990 to 1999, he taught at the Indiana University School of Law — Bloomington. During 1999, he was the Bruce W. Nichols Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
Judge Markell is the author of numerous articles on bankruptcy and commercial law. He is a member of the editorial board of Collier on Bankruptcy, and contributes several chapters to that publication. He is the author of several casebooks, including Making and Doing Deals: Contracts in Context (2d ed. 2006), with Professor David Epstein and Dean Lawrence Ponoroff, Bankruptcy (Including BAPCPA): 21st Century Debtor-Creditor Law (2d ed. 2006), with Professors David Epstein and Steve Nickles and Judge Elizabeth Perris, Core Concepts of Commercial Law: Past, Present & Future, a commercial law casebook with Professor John Dolan and Dean Larry Ponoroff, and Securitization, Structured Finance and Capital Markets, a set of teaching materials on securitization, with Professors Steven L. Schwarcz and Lissa Broome.
In 1997 Judge Markell was selected as a member of the American Law Institute, and in 2000 he was selected as a member of the International Insolvency Institute and as a fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy.
He has served as an advisor on bankruptcy and secured transaction reform to the Republic of Indonesia, was the International Bar Association’s representative to UNCITRAL’s creation of a model law on the assignment of international receivables, and was asked by the United Nations to be a expert consultant to its project to create a legislative guide for secured transactions.