Karen Gross

Professor of Law
President, Southern Vermont College
Founder and Former President,
Coalition for Consumer Bankruptcy Debtor Education

On July 14, 2006, the Trustees of Southern Vermont College announced the appointment of New York Law School Professor Karen Gross as the college's eighth president. Her appointment will begin in August 2006. Professor Gross will continue to be affiliated with New York Law School and will teach the Financial Advocacy course in August 2006 and in January 2007.(NYLS Press Release; SVC Press Release)

In all her years of legal practice and scholarship, Karen Gross has earned a reputation among colleagues as a scholar dedicated to studying and advocating for remedies to the human impact of overindebtedness.

Professor Gross teaches consumer finance, bankruptcy, corporate reorganization, financial advocacy, commercial law, and contracts. She also conducts empirical and historical research on these topics. Professor Gross advocates to preserve the United States bankruptcy system as a social safety net and to improve the financial literacy skills of individuals, most especially women, minorities, and students of all ages and educational levels. She serves as president of the Coalition for Consumer Bankruptcy Debtor Education, an award-winning pro bono organization she cofounded. She is the director of New York Law School’s Economic Literacy Consortium, and serves as a consultant to non-profit organizations.

Author of the acclaimed 1997 book, Failure and Forgiveness: Rebalancing the Bankruptcy System (Yale University Press), which won the Association of American Publishers Business Management Award, and numerous scholarly articles, Professor Gross is a frequent commentator for the media and lecturer on consumer finance and consumer bankruptcy. She also studies women and money and coauthored an article on the first women debtors in the United States entitled, “Ladies in Red: Learning from America’s First Female Bankrupts,” which was published in the American Journal of Legal History. Some of her current articles appear in University Business and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She serves on various advisory boards and most recently became a member of the Foundation Board of Open Door Family Medical Centers, an organization that provides primary healthcare to underserved communities.

Prior to entering academia in 1984, Professor Gross practiced bankruptcy law at Arvey Hodes Costello & Burman in Chicago and at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP in New York. Although her initial years in practice were focused on business bankruptcy, she has since worked with overindebted individuals, including at the Legal Aid Society of New York. She also serves as an expert witness in bankruptcy and consumer finance cases.

Contrary to the commonly held belief that many debtors are abusing the bankruptcy system, Professor Gross advocates an approach toward debtors based on compassion and rehabilitation. She says that individuals trained in money and credit management can better re-enter our consumer credit marketplace as more knowledgeable and thoughtful citizens. She also believes that many individuals are vulnerable to predatory lending schemes, and she works on ways individuals can avoid unfair lending practices and build assets and credit.

She has testified before governmental bodies, including the House Judiciary Committee in 2001 on proposed bankruptcy legislation which she said was likely to have a negative effect on women and children. In 2003, she testified before the New York City Council on holiday financial scams.

As an advocate of debtor education, Professor Gross proposed a comprehensive program for consumer debtors in her 1997 testimony before the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. Through her Coalition, she and her colleague at Fordham Law School, Susan Block-Lieb, together with their social science team, developed and then conducted and empirically assessed a pilot financial literacy project for consumer debtors in bankruptcy. They received the New York State Bar Association’s 2002 President’s Pro Bono Service Award for their work.

Professor Gross has also brought her expertise to foreign venues. In May 2005, she spoke at Bifrost University in Iceland on women and money, and she has spoken at various meetings of experts in England, Scotland, and Portugal on financial literacy education and how to prevent and deal with consumer overindebtedness. She was cochair of the Bankruptcy Working Group of the Second Circuit Gender Fairness Committee and has been a distinguished visiting professor at Southeastern Bankruptcy Law Institute, University of Maine Law School, and St. Thomas Law School. She was recently awarded the AAUW senior scholar special commendation of honor. In May 2006, Professor Gross was honored for her work by Westchester Community College, New York, in a program commemorating Women's History Month.