Pamela Foohey

Pamela Foohey joined the University of Georgia School of Law faculty as a full professor in 2024. She teaches Bankruptcy, Secured Transactions and a Bankruptcy Practice Seminar.

Foohey comes to Athens from the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, where she was honored with the Distinguished Professor Award in 2024. Foohey previously was a professor of law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, where she taught for seven years. While at Indiana, she served as advisory board chair for the Center for Law, Society & Culture. She was also recognized with several teaching awards, including the 2019 Wallace Teaching Award, the 2018 Trustees’ Teaching Award and the 2017 Gavel Award, in addition to being named the 2020 Outstanding Interactive Professor. From 2012 to 2014, she was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Illinois College of Law.

Specializing in bankruptcy, commercial law, consumer finance and business law, Foohey’s scholarship primarily involves empirical studies of bankruptcy and related parts of the legal system, combining quantitative and qualitative interview-based research. She presently serves as a co-investigator on the Consumer Bankruptcy Law Project, a long-term research project studying persons who file bankruptcy. Data from this research project serve as the basis of her in-progress co-authored book Debt’s Grip: Risk and Consumer Bankruptcy, forthcoming with the University of California Press. Her work in business bankruptcy focuses on nonprofit entities, with a particular emphasis on how religious organizations use bankruptcy. Data from this project are included in her other in-progress book Forgive Us Our Debts: How Black Churches Use Bankruptcy to Survive, forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press.

She is a co-author for Secured Transactions: A Systems Approach, a leading textbook on the topic, and for Commercial Transactions: A Systems Approach. Her recent scholarship includes the article “Silencing Litigation Through Bankruptcy” in the Virginia Law Review. Other leading journals publishing her work include the Southern California Law Review, the Boston College Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review and Law & Contemporary Problems, among others.

Foohey has assisted members of Congress and federal and state agencies in the areas of bankruptcy and consumer credit. She has also provided expert media commentary for high profile publications such as The New York Times, Financial Times and The Washington Post, in addition to Bloomberg and National Public Radio.

She is a member of the American Law Institute and has served on the executive committees of several Association of American Law Schools sections. She is a co-organizer of the Law & Society Association’s Household Finance Collaborative Research Network and serves on the editorial advisory board of the Law & Society Review. She previously served a three-year appointment on the editorial advisory board of the American Bankruptcy Law Journal. Additionally, she is active in the American Bankruptcy Institute, having served as part of its Diversity Working Group since its formation. In 2019, the ABI named her a “40 Under 40” Emerging Leader in Insolvency Practice.

Prior to entering academia, Foohey served as a judicial clerk for Judge Thomas L. Ambro of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and Judge Peter J. Walsh of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. She also worked as an associate in the Bankruptcy and Financial Restructuring Group of Dorsey & Whitney in Minneapolis. Foohey earned her B.S. summa cum laude from New York University’s undergraduate Stern School of Business and her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School.