Penn State
Lewis Katz Building, University Park, PA
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Commercial Law Faculty

  • Larry Catá Backer

    Professor Larry Catá Backer immigrated with his family from Cuba when he was young, growing up in the Cuban American community in Miami. Professor Backer focuses his research on governance-related issues of globalization and the constitutional theories of public and private governance, with an emphasis on institutional frameworks for public-private law governance systems. Recent work centers on issues of corporate social responsibility, mixed regulatory systems and regulatory governance (especially touching on SOEs and SWFs), the emerging problems of polycentricity where multiple systems might be simultaneously applied to a single issue or event, and problems of translation between Western and Marxist Leninist (especially Chinese and Cuban) constitutional systems.

  • Julia Lee

    Professor Lee’s research interests are in the fields of financial regulation and commercial law, with a focus on strategic decision-making and the impact of legal rules and social norms on human behavior. Prior to joining Penn State Law, she was a senior regional attorney with the FDIC in Chicago, where she advised on the supervision of troubled banks and conducted prohibition and removal actions against bank officers and directors. Previous to that, she was an associate in the securities practice group of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, where she counseled broker-dealers and other financial institutions on compliance with federal securities laws and self-regulatory organization rules.

  • John Lopatka

    Professor John Lopatka is one of the nation's leading antitrust scholars, having published over forty articles in the areas of antitrust, economic analysis of law, and regulated industries. He co-authored the multi-volume treatise Federal Antitrust Law and The Microsoft Case: Antitrust, High Technology, and Consumer Welfare, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. 

  • Marie T. Reilly is a professor at Penn State Law and an expert in bankruptcy and commercial law. She served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2008 to 2015. Prior to joining the Penn State faculty, she was a professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law. Before she became a law teacher, she practiced law with Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C., and Schiff Hardin in Chicago, Illinois. She teaches contracts, bankruptcy, and commercial law subjects and co-teaches a bootcamp-style course on business fundamentals for law students. Her scholarship considers legal responses to insolvency problems in light of economic, political, and social influences over time. She is a co-author of a law school casebook on secured transactions.

  • Tom Sharbaugh

    Professor Tom Sharbaugh brings more than 35 years of practice experience to the classroom. Before joining Penn State Law, Tom was the firm-wide managing partner of operations at the Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP law firm, based in the firm’s Philadelphia office. In this position, which he held for 15 years, Tom was responsible for the day-to-day operations of the global law firm with more than 3,100 personnel. As a partner in the firm's Business & Finance Practice Group, he represented a wide variety of clients in transactional and corporate matters, including private equity funds in M&A and investment transactions.