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Melissa B. Jacoby

Graham Kenan Professor of Law

Melissa B. Jacoby is the Graham Kenan Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she won the inaugural Robert G. Byrd Award for Excellence and Creativity in Teaching and where she teaches debtor-creditor and commercial law courses. Jacoby's research takes multidisciplinary approaches to exploring a range of bankruptcy, debtor-creditor and commercial law problems. She is a co-principal investigator of the 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project, a nationally-representative dataset on families in bankruptcy. She also is an elected member of the American Law Institute and the National Bankruptcy Conference, through which she remains involved in legislative and policy initiatives, is part of the Rethinking Regulation group at Duke University's Kenan Institute for Ethics, and is a contributor to Credit Slips. Earlier in her career, she clerked for the Honorable Robert E. Ginsberg of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois and the Honorable Marjorie O. Rendell of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and worked in Washington D.C. as a senior staff attorney for the National Bankruptcy Review Commission.   Many publications are posted at http://ssrn.com/author=224683, and her full curriculum vitae can be found at  http://works.bepress.com/melissa_jacoby/. She graduated with honors from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. 

Selected Publications

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  • Dodd-Frank, Regulatory Innovation, and the Safety of Consumer Financial Products, 15 N.C. BANKING INST. 99 (2011) (symposium). [Westlaw, Lexis/Nexis, Hein, BEPress]
  • In or Out of Mortgage Trouble:  A Study of Bankrupt Homeowners (with D. McCue & E. Belsky), 85 AM. BANKR. L.J. 291 (2011). [SSRN, Hein]
  • Managing Medical Bills on the Brink of Bankruptcy (with M. Holman), 10 YALE J. HEALTH POL'Y L. & ETHICS 239 (2010). [Westlaw, Lexis/Nexis, SSRN, Hein, BEPress]
  • The Debt Financing of Parenthood, 72 LAW & CONTEMP. PROBS. 147 (2009) (symposium). [Westlaw, Lexis/Nexis, SSRN, Hein]
  • Homeownership Risk Beyond a Subprime Crisis: The Role of Delinquency Management, 76 FORDHAM L. REV. 2261 (2008). [Westlaw, Lexis/Nexis, SSRN, Hein, BEPress]
  • Beyond Hospital Misbehavior: An Alternative Account of Medical-Related Financial Distress (with E. Warren), 100 NW. U.L. REV. 535 (2006). [Westlaw, Lexis/Nexis, SSRN, Hein, BEPress]
  • Fast, Cheap, and Creditor-Controlled: Is Corporate Reorganization Failing? 54 BUFF. L. REV. 401 (2006) (symposium), (reviewing Lynn M. LoPucki, COURTING FAILURE: HOW COMPETITION FOR BIG CASES IS CORRUPTING THE BANKRUPTCY COURTS (2005)). [Westlaw, Lexis/Nexis, SSRN, Hein, BEPress KF1526 .L67 2005]
  • Ripple or Revolution? The Indeterminacy of Statutory Bankruptcy Reform, 79 AM. BANK. L.J. 169 (2005) (symposium). [Lexis/Nexis, SSRN, BEPress]
  • Does Indebtedness Influence Health? A Preliminary Inquiry, 30 J. L. MED. & ETHICS 560 (2002). [BEPress]
  • Foreclosing on Fame: Exploring the Uncharted Boundaries of the Right of Publicity, 77 N.Y.U. L. REV. 1322 (2002) (with D. Zimmerman) (reprinted in 11 J. BANKR. L. & PRAC. (2002)). [Westlaw, Lexis/Nexis, SSRN, Hein, BEPress]


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