More Endowed Law Chairs

Dr. Charles W. Mooney, Jr. is the Charles A. Heimbold, Jr. Professor of Law. Dr. Mooney is one of the foremost experts in the country on commercial law and bankruptcy law issues and widely respected for his unique and lasting contributions to law reform. He has written over 40 articles and two widely-used case books, Security Interests in Personal Property and Sales and Secured Financing, which are widely used in law schools around the country. 

Dr. Mooney has been very active in numerous professional organizations, among them the American Law Institute, as a Fellow at the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers and American College of Bankruptcy; Chair of the ABA Committee on Uniform Commercial Code; Chair of the Sub-committee on Personal Property Leasing; Member, Secretary of State's Federal Advisory Committee on Private International Law; and as a U.S. Delegate (appointed by the Department of State) to numerous international conferences.

The American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers recently honored Dr. Mooney with the Distinguished Service Award for his contributions to the uniform law process. Dr. Mooney has also performed invaluable administrative service to the Law School as Associate Dean and Interim Dean, and to the University as Chair-elect of the Faculty Senate and a member of the Presidential Search Consultative Committee. After a successful career in private practice, he joined the Penn Law faculty in 1986.

Dr. Kim Lane Scheppele is the John J. O'Brien Professor of Comparative Law and Professor of Sociology. Dr. Scheppele is one of the leading socio-legal scholars in the country today. She has written widely on subjects ranging from legal fictions to insider trading and from problems of evidence law to interest group lobbying. In the last decade, her work has focused on comparative constitutional law, involving extensive periods of field work in Hungary and Russia. In addition to a book on constitutional development in post-socialist Europe, she has been working on a large project analyzing legal responses of the U.S. and Europe to the events of September 11. Recent articles include "A Realpolitik Defense of Social Rights," Texas Law Review (2004); "Constitutional Ethnography," Law and Society Review (2004); "Constitutional Negotiations: Political Contexts of Judicial Activism in Post-Soviet Europe," International Sociology (2003); and "Aspirational and Aversive Constitutionalism: The Case for Studying Cross-Constitutional Influence through Negative Models," International Journal of Constitutional Law (2003). Her first book, Legal Secrets: Equality and Efficiency in the Common Law, received special recognition in the Distinguished Scholarly Publication award competition of the American Sociological Association. 

Dr. Scheppele has also won a large number of highly competitive research grants, including several National Science Foundation grants.  She was most recently appointed a Fellow at the Center for Law & Public Affairs at Princeton University (2004-2005). She has been an advisor to the United Nations task force charged with helping to construct Afghanistan's new constitution, and she testified before the Florida legislature on matters connected to the election recount in 2000. Dr. Scheppele has served in a broad variety of academic leadership positions in the Law and Society Association, American Sociological Association and the American Political Science Association. She received the Robert A. Gorman Teaching Award at Penn Law in 2002 and several major teaching awards from the University of Michigan, where she taught for 12 years before coming to Penn. Dr. Scheppele joined the Penn Law faculty in 1996.

Dr. David A. Skeel is the S. Samuel Arsht Professor of Corporate Law.  Dr. Skeel has become one of the country's foremost authorities on corporate law and commercial bankruptcy.  He is the author of Debt's Dominion: A History of Bankruptcy Law in America (2001), a forthcoming monograph on corporate scandals, and over 40 law review articles and essays. Among the most recent include "Creditors Ball: The 'New' New Corporate Governance in Chapter 11," University of Pennsylvania Law Review (2003), "Can Majority Voting Provisions Do It All?" Emory Law Journal (2003), "Corporate Anatomy Lessons," Yale Law Journal (forthcoming 2004), and "Corporate Ownership Structure and the Evolution of Bankruptcy Law: Lessons from the United Kingdom," Vanderbilt Law Review (2002).  

The national media constantly seeks Dr. Skeel's expertise into the recent corporate bankruptcies and other business-related issues. Dr. Skeel has twice received the Harvey Levin Award for Excellence in Teaching. He  joined the Penn Law faculty in 1999 from Temple University.