Prof. Robert M. Lawless

Prof. Robert M. Lawless is the Max L. Rowe Professor of Law and co-director of the Program on Law, Behavior & Social Science at the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign, Ill., where he writes and teaches about bankruptcy, consumer finance and business law. He also served as the College’s associate dean for research from 2013-16. Committed to bridging scholarship and real-world policy, Prof. Lawless has played a key role in shaping discussions on bankruptcy reform. He served as the reporter for the ABI’s Commission on Consumer Bankruptcy and received ABI’s Service Award in 2019. He is a co-author of Secured Transactions: A Systems Approach and Empirical Methods in Law. He also administers the blog Credit Slips, a discussion on credit, finance and bankruptcy. He also is a co-principal investigator in the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, a long-term research project studying persons who file bankruptcy. Prof. Lawless has testified before Congress, and his work has been featured in media outlets such as CNN, C-SPAN, NPR, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” ABC News and the Financial Times. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the National Bankruptcy Conference, and he is a Fellow in the American College of Bankruptcy. Prior to joining the Illinois law faculty, Prof. Lawless served on the law faculties of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law, and he has been a visiting faculty member at Ohio State University and Washington University in St. Louis. Prof. Lawless began his career as a law clerk for Hon. Harlington Wood, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, then practiced law in Washington, D.C., with the firm of Zuckert, Scoutt & Rasenberger. He received both his undergraduate degree in accounting and his J.D. from the University of Illinois, during which time he served as editor-in-chief of the University of Illinois Law Review.