Corporate Law and Practice Faculty

Professor Copeland focuses her scholarship on white collar crime and health care fraud and abuse. Prior to joining Penn State she clerked for Judge David H. Coar of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and Judge Damon J. Keith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and practiced at Sidley Austin LLP in Washington, D.C. Her practice focused on white collar criminal defense and constitutional litigation. As part of her white collar crime practice, she represented pharmaceutical companies in health care fraud and abuse prosecutions.

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.

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.

Professor Scott has a wide range of teaching and scholarly interests, but his focus is in intellectual property and on the intersection of the worlds of artistic and scientific expression and the law. He has given particular attention to the protection of cultural properties in both Europe and Asia, to domestic and international entertainment issues with an emphasis on music, and to the representation of the individual professional athlete. He received a Fulbright Scholar award in 2004-2005 for his research in the protection of cultural and ethnographic properties in Asia, and he has been a visiting professor and scholar at the University of Delaware Graduate College of Marine Studies in the fields of biotechnology and intellectual property law.

Professor Thompson directs Penn State’s Center for the Study of Mergers and Acquisitions and teaches on the corporate, securities, tax, and antitrust aspects of mergers and acquisitions as well as international tax, investment banking, taxation of business entities, and economic growth policy. Professor Thompson has been a tax policy advisor, on behalf of the U.S. Treasure Tax Assistance Office, to the South African Ministry of Finance in Pretoria, South Africa.