Bio :

Hon. Michelle M. Harner is a U.S. Bankruptcy Judge for the District of Maryland in Baltimore, appointed in 2017. Prior to her appointment to the bench, she was 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, where she taught courses in bankruptcy and creditors’ rights, business associations, business planning, corporate finance and the legal profession. Judge Harner lectured frequently during her academic career on various topics involving corporate governance, financially distressed entities, risk management and related legal issues. Her academic scholarship is widely published, with her publications appearing in, among others, the Vanderbilt Law Review, Notre Dame Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, Fordham Law Review (reprinted in Corporate Practice Commentator), Washington & Lee Law Review, William & Mary Law Review, University of Illinois Law Review, Arizona Law Review (reprinted in Corporate Practice Commentator) and Florida Law Review. 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 most recently chaired the Dodd-Frank Study Working Group for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. She also served as the Robert M. Zinman ABI Resident Scholar for the fall of 2015. She most recently served as the chair of the Dodd-Frank Study Working Group for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, and she is currently serving as a member of the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure and an associate editor of the American Bankruptcy Law Journal. 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.