Katherine M. Porter
Associate Professor
katie-porter@uiowa.edu
319-335-7490
431 Boyd Law Building

BA, Yale University, cum laude, 1996
JD, Harvard Law School, magna cum laude, 2001

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Professor Katherine Porter joined the College of Law faculty in 2005. In the prior year, she was a Visiting Associate Professor at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada—Las Vegas. She earned her B.A. in American Studies from Yale University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School. While in law school, she served as Project Director of Phase III of the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, a national, longitudinal study of consumer debtors that involved over a dozen principal investigators. In 2004, she served as Project Director of the Business Bankruptcy Project Update, which collected data on business reorganization cases. Upon graduation, she served as a law clerk to the Honorable Richard Arnold of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eight 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.

Professor Porter conducts empirical research on consumer and commercial laws. Her current research examines mortgage claims in consumer bankruptcies and is funded by the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges’ Endowment for Education. She is a principal investigator in a new study of consumer bankruptcy that will begin in 2007, the Consumer Bankruptcy Project IV. Her recent publications include Going Broke the Hard Way: The Economics of Rural Failure (Wisconsin Law Review 2005), The Failure of Bankruptcy’s Fresh Start (Cornell Law Review 2006), and The Bright Side of BAPCPA (Missouri Law Review 2006).

She teaches bankruptcy, commercial law, and consumer law and accepts press inquiries in these fields. Particular areas of interest to her are rural financial hardship, mortgage consumer protection laws, and predatory or high-yield lending.