Hon. Robert E. Gerber

Bio

Hon. Robert E. Gerber is Of Counsel with Zaiger Linden Roberti & Pepe LLC in New York and is a retired U.S. Bankruptcy Judge for the Southern District of New York in New York, appointed in 2000 and reappointed in 2014. He assumed recall status in January 2015 and retired in January 2016. Judge Gerber provides mediation, arbitration, consulting, litigation and fiduciary services in complex insolvency and corporate governance matters. He joined the firm in 2026, reuniting at the firm with friends and former colleagues from Joseph Hage Aaronson — a complex commercial litigation firm founded by his longtime friend and former partner, the late Gregory P. Joseph — where he was Of Counsel for a decade after retiring as a bankruptcy judge. During his tenure on the bench, Judge Gerber presided over many of the nation’s largest and most complex business bankruptcy cases, including Global Crossing, Adelphia, Ames Department Stores, PSINet, ABIZ, Basis Yield Alpha Fund, BearingPoint, DBSD North America, Chemtura, Pinnacle Airlines, Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, Lyondell Chemical and General Motors. Over the course of his judicial service, he handled 10 cases with more than $1 billion in debt and many more with more than $100 million in debt, and issued approximately 200 published opinions focused principally on complex bankruptcy and corporate governance issues. Before his appointment to the bench, Judge Gerber practiced at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson in New York City, where he specialized in securities and commercial litigation, bankruptcy litigation and counseling. He served in the U.S. Air Force from 1971-72 as a First Lieutenant, working in the areas of military procurement and production and legal assistance to Air Force personnel and their families. Judge Gerber is an adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School, where he has taught its Advanced Bankruptcy Seminar since 2012. He is also a contributing author to Collier on Bankruptcy and a Fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy, and he is a member of the New York and Connecticut Bars. Judge Gerber earned his B.S. with high honors in industrial engineering from Rutgers University in 1967 and his J.D. magna cum laude from Columbia Law School in 1970, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and a James Kent Scholar.