Faculty

Steven L. Schwarcz

Stanley A. Star Professor of Law & Business

Schwarcz Steven Schwarcz is the Stanley A. Star Professor of Law & Business at Duke University. After graduating first in his class in engineering school (B.S. summa cum laude, New York University School of Engineering and Science), majoring in aeronautics and astronautics, he worked on legislative initiatives involving science and law while earning his J.D. degree from Columbia Law School. Prior to joining the Duke faculty in 1996, he was a partner at the law firm of Shearman & Sterling and then a partner and practice group chairman at Kaye Scholer LLP, where he represented many of the world’s leading banks and other financial institutions in structuring innovative capital market financing transactions, both domestic and international. He also helped to pioneer the field of asset securitization, and his book, Structured Finance, A Guide to the Principles of Asset Securitization (3d edition with supplements), is one of the most widely used texts in the field.

While practicing law, Professor Schwarcz taught at the Yale, Columbia, and Cardozo (Yeshiva University) law schools. His main areas of scholarship are international finance and capital markets, bankruptcy, and commercial law, where he brings the unique perspective of having been a leading practitioner as well as a scholar. In these inherently business dominated subjects, he works closely with colleagues at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, where he has a secondary appointment. He also founded and was the first faculty director of Duke’s interdisciplinary Global Capital Markets Center.

Professor Schwarcz has testified before committees of both the Senate and House of Representatives, and also has been an adviser to the United Nations on international receivables financing, a member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on Private International Law, Visiting Professor at the University of Geneva Faculty of Law, Senior Fellow at The University of Melbourne Law School, and Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford.

Among other honors, Professor Schwarcz has presented endowed or distinguished public lectures at The University of Hong Kong, Georgetown University Law Center, Southern Methodist University (SMU) Dedman School of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, The University of Tennessee, Hofstra University School of Law, the University of Oxford, National University of Singapore, Chapman University, The National Assembly of the Republic of Korea, and the Korean Financial Supervisory Service. He also has been the keynote speaker at conferences of the Corporate Law Teachers Association of Australia, New Zealand, and Asia-Pacific, the New York Law School Law Review, the University of South Carolina Law Review, the New York University School of Law Journal of Law and Business, the Chapman University Law Review, Moody’s Corporation, and the Asian Securitisation Forum. Professor Schwarcz is also a Fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy, a Founding Member of the International Insolvency Institute, a Fellow of the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers, and Business Law Advisor to the American Bar Association Section on Business Law.

Recent Activities