Hon. Michelle M. Harner

Hon. Michelle M. Harner is a U.S. Bankruptcy Judge for the District of Maryland in Baltimore. Prior to her appointment to the bench, she served as the Francis King Carey Professor of Law and the Director of the Business Law Program at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. At UM Carey Law School, Judge Harner taught courses in bankruptcy and creditors’ rights, business associations, business planning, corporate finance and the legal profession. She lectured frequently during her academic career on various topics involving corporate governance, financially distressed entities, risk-management and related legal issues, and her academic scholarship is widely published. Judge Harner has served as the Associate Reporter to the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure, the Reporter to the ABI Commission to Study the Reform of Chapter 11, and the Robert M. Zinman ABI Resident Scholar for the fall of 2015. She is currently serving as a member of the Federal Judicial Center Board and the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure, and she is the editor-in-chief of the American Bankruptcy Law Journal. She also just completed her service as the chair of the Dodd-Frank Study Working Group for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Judge Harner is an elected conferee of the National Bankruptcy Conference, an elected Fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy, and an elected member of the American Law Institute. She previously was in private practice in the business restructuring, insolvency, bankruptcy and related transactional fields, most recently as a partner at the Chicago office of the international law firm Jones Day. Judge Harner received her B.A. cum laude from Boston College in 1992 and her J.D. summa cum laude from The Ohio State University College of Law in 1995.