Debt’s Grip: Risk and Consumer Bankruptcy (U. California Press 2025) (with Pamela Foohey and Deborah Thorne) — a book-length examination of financial precarity in the United States using files from the U.S. bankruptcy courts and the words of the filers themselves (available August 5, 2025)

Debt on the Ground: The Scholarly Discourse of Bankruptcy and Financial Precarity, 20 Ann. Rev. Law & Social Sci. (2024) (with Pamela Foohey & Deborah Thorne) — a review of the state of the literature on consumer bankruptcy with suggestions for future directions

Portraits of Bankruptcy Filers, 56 Ga. L. Rev. 573 (2022) (with Pamela Foohey & Deborah Thorne) — deploying an “unsupervised” statistical analysis to identify the nine types of bankruptcy cases only using the characteristics of the cases themselves

Attitudes, Behavior and Institutional Inversion: The Case of Debt, 120 J. Personality & Social Psych. 1117 (2021) (with Dov Cohen & Faith Shin) — antidebt attitudes from Protestant areas produce institutions favorable to accumulation of debt as compared to more friendly attitudes from Roman Catholic areas

Driven to Bankruptcy, 55 Wake Forest L. Rev. 287 (2020) (with Pamela Foohey & Deborah Thorne) — showing how many bankruptcy filers are there to save their lifeline to employment, schooling, and healthcare, namely an automobile

Life in the Sweatbox, 94 Notre Dame L. Rev. 219 (2018) (with Pamela Foohey, Katherine Porter & Deborah Thorne) — documenting the suffering and wealth depletion during the time in the “financial sweatbox” before filing bankruptcy and how people are waiting longer to file

The Myth of the Disappearing Business Bankruptcy, 93 Cal. L. Rev. 743 (2005) (with Elizabeth Warren) — finding one in seven bankruptcy cases is filed by someone who owns a business, roughly seven times the rate suggested by official government statistics

The Graying of Bankruptcy, 90 Sociological Inquiry 681 (2020) (with Pamela Foohey, Katherine Porter & Deborah Thorne) — more and more Americans are beginning retirement with bankruptcy rather than a comfortable pension; the fastest growing group of bankruptcy filers are people age 65 or over

Local Legal Culture from R2D2 to Big Data, 96 Tex. L. Rev. 1353 (2018) (with Angela K. Littwin) — using big data techniques and finding that race remains the primary explanatory variable on why some locales have high chapter 13 rates

The Opposite of Correct: Inverted Insider Perceptions of Race & Bankruptcy, 91 Am. Bankr. L.J.  623 (2017) (with Dov Cohen & Faith Shin) — in a survey consumer bankruptcy attorneys get the racial composition of chapter 13 bankruptcy exactly the opposite, believing that white filers are twice as likely as Black filers when in fact it is the opposite

“No Money Down” Bankruptcy, 90 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1055 (2017) (with Pamela Foohey, Katherine Porter & Deborah Thorne) — documenting the rise in “no money down” bankruptcy where bankruptcy filers finance their chapter 13 attorney’s fees entirely through their chapter 13 plan; the primary determinants of whether a filer does a “no money down” plan is whether the filer is Black and where the filer lives

Race, Attorney Influence, and Bankruptcy Chapter Choice, 9 J. Empirical Legal Stud. 323 (2012) (with Jean Braucher and Dov Cohen) — the original article establishing the overrepresentations of Black bankruptcy filers in chapter 13; in a regression analysis, race is the primary determinant of chapter choice; in an experimental vignette study, consumer bankruptcy lawyers were twice as likely to recommend chapter 13 to a stereotypical Black filer than a white filer

Secured Transactions: A Systems Approach (Aspen, 10th ed. 2024) (with Lynn M. LoPucki, Elizabeth Warren & Pamela Foohey) — the leading textbook on secured lending; uses a problem-based approach to teach practical lawyering strategy

Empirical Methods in Law (Aspen, 2d ed. 2016) (with Jennifer K. Robbennolt & Thomas S. Ulen) — introduces social science methods and statistical concepts to law students in an intuitive style requiring no prior knowledge of math or statistics; designed for students who will work with expert witnesses or want to pursue research careers