Faculty Profiles
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Katherine Porter
Title: Visiting Associate Professor of Law
Office: 798 Simon Hall
Tel: 510-642-1780
Email Address: kporter@law.berkeley.edu
FSU Contact: Cathy Romanski
Katherine Porter is visiting at Berkeley Law for the 2009-10 academic year. Her regular appointment is as Associate Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law. Porter is an expert on bankruptcy and consumer credit law who conducts empirical research on families in financial distress. She is a principal investigator in the 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project and a fellow of the Bankruptcy Data Project at Harvard. Her empirical project, the Mortgage Study, generated new data on the practices of mortgage servicers in bankruptcy cases and the challenges that homeowners face in trying to save their homes from foreclosure. Her current research examines the consequences and outcomes of severe financial distress. With funding from the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges, Porter is studying what happens to people who drop out of the bankruptcy process without discharging their debts. She is also writing a book on the ways in which financial hardship affects people’s marriages, children, employment, and financial decision-making.
Porter’s recent articles include “Saving up for Bankruptcy” in the Georgetown Law Journal, “Misbehavior and Mistake in Bankruptcy Mortgage Claims” in the Texas Law Review, and “The Failure of Bankruptcy’s Fresh Start” in the Cornell Law Review. She has testified several times before Congress on consumer credit issues and has made media appearances on ABC Nightline, The Today Show, National Public Radio and in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek. She is a regular contributor to Credit Slips, a blog about credit and bankruptcy.
Before entering academia, Porter clerked for Judge Richard Sheppard Arnold of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. She then worked as an associate at Stoel Rives LLP in Portland, Oregon, where she practiced with the firm’s bankruptcy and creditors’ rights group. In 2004, she was the Project Director of the Business Bankruptcy Project Update a study of reorganization bankruptcies. Immediately prior to joining the Iowa Law faculty in 2005, Porter was a Visiting Associate Professor at the Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Education:
B.A., Yale University (1996)J.D., Harvard Law School (2001)
