Michael Francus To Join UVA Law Faculty Bankruptcy Scholar, Taught at Notre Dame, Worked as Fellow at Harvard Law School

Michael Francus, a bankruptcy law scholar, will join the University of Virginia School of Law faculty this summer after spending the past year as a visiting professor.

Francus’ research focuses primarily on government bankruptcy and mass-tort bankruptcy.

His education in public financial distress began long before he started law school.

Raised in Pittsburgh, Francus saw the aftereffects of his hometown struggling with the demise of the steel industry and, amid a financial crisis, narrowly averting bankruptcy in the 2000s, when Pennsylvania declared the city to be financially distressed and intervened extensively in the city’s finances.

“There was still a lot of recovery going on,” he said. “Pittsburgh was still reinventing itself as a city, and that was the atmosphere when I was growing up.”

Bankruptcy law would ultimately become Francus’ focus as a law professor.

Francus majored in philosophy and political science at the University of Chicago, with the goal of working in public policy or politics. A conversation with a mentor while in college about the value of a law degree for a career in policymaking, though, led him to reassess his postgraduation plans.

Francus enrolled in Stanford Law School where, he said, he “fell in love with the law” and “realized that I enjoyed doing legal work separate from any of the political or policy dimensions.”

While in law school, he also discovered the direction he ultimately wanted to go after receiving his degree.

“The world needs lawyers. But if what you really love is the conceptual thinking about the law, the intellectual engagement, then being a law professor is just the best gig on the planet,” Francus said. He would later work as a Climenko Fellow at Harvard Law School, a program for up-and-coming legal scholars with an interest in teaching ahead of their entry into academia.