Tulane Law Welcomes Computational Legal Scholar Walker Kahn to the Faculty

Kahn holds a joint appointment with Tulane Law School and The Murphy Institute and will teach bankruptcy, secured transactions, and political economy. His work brings together doctrinal, computational, and ethnographic research methods to study high-volume consumer debt litigation.

Much of Kahn’s scholarship explores how changes in financial markets have transformed debt collection and reshaped the role of courts. Using doctrinal, computational, and artificial intelligence methods, he studies due process in bankruptcy and mortgage foreclosure litigation.

Kahn’s research examines how mortgage securitization has changed foreclosure practices and how judges both enabled and constrained aggressive tactics during the 2008 housing crisis. Kahn also studies the growth of high-volume debt collection and its effects on court funding. In particular, he considers whether courts’ increasing reliance on debt-collection filing fees may compromise their ability to serve as neutral tribunals for financially distressed consumers.

“Walker brings an exciting interdisciplinary perspective to Tulane Law, connecting legal scholarship with sociology and new approaches to understanding how our courts and financial systems affect people’s lives,” Dean Marcilynn Burke said. “His work will strengthen both the law school and our important partnership with The Murphy Institute.”

His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation Law and Science Dissertation Grant and the Center for Engaged Scholarship. His 2024 article, “Safe as Houses: Financialization, Foreclosure, and Precarious Homeownership in the United States,” published in the American Sociological Review, is the first from a larger project tracing how foreclosure litigation evolved during the subprime mortgage boom. Using a case study of Cook County, Illinois, the article combines quantitative analysis of court dockets and metadata with interviews and archival research to show that mortgage securitization changed foreclosure litigation in ways that significantly increased forced residential displacement. The article received the Ronald Burt Student Paper Award from the Economic Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.

Before joining Tulane, Kahn was a postdoctoral fellow at the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo School of Law. He earned his J.D. and his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He holds a master’s degree in sociology from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from New College of Florida.

Kahn is among the group of new faculty to join the law school this fall, which includes Professor Brian Frye, whose scholarship focuses on intellectual property and art law, and clinical faculty Professors Francesca Bucci, Tasia Kastanek and Jessica Wood. The law school also added two new Forrester Fellows, Professors Ashita Alag and Marilyn Hajj.