Melissa Jacoby

Melissa B. Jacoby is the Graham Kenan Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she has been teaching secured transactions, advanced commercial law and contracts, and bankruptcy. She has won awards for teaching, service, and scholarship, including the Grant Gilmore Award for Superior Writing in the Field of Commercial Finance from the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers. She is the author of the book Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal (The New Press June 2024) and over fifty articles, essays, and other writings, and has testified before House and Senate committees of Congress on various aspects of debtor-creditor law. She is an elected member of the American Law Institute, the American College of Bankruptcy, and the National Bankruptcy Conference, as well as the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers. From 2021 to 2024, appointed by Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, Jacoby helped develop educational programming for judges through the Federal Judicial Center. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Jacoby was a law clerk for the Honorable Robert E. Ginsberg, U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois, and later for the Honorable Marjorie O. Rendell, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.