About

Barry E. Adler is the Lawrence King Professor of Law and serves as an Associate Dean for Information Systems and Technology at NYU School of Law. His areas of research include bankruptcy, contracts, corporate finance, and torts. As an instructor, he leads the 1L Reading Group: Law, Economics, and Equality, where the focus is on how economic analysis of law can help assess and address inequalities under the law. The course explores topics such as rent control, foreclosure prohibitions, affirmative-action policies, and the interpretation of evidence in civil rights litigation, utilizing articles from academic journals and Supreme Court opinions. No prior knowledge of economics or statistics is required for students.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Actuarial science
• Finance
• Law
• Business
• Computer Security
• Economics
• Law and economics
• History
• Accounting
• Financial system

Selected publications

• A Dilution Mechanism for Valuing Corporations in Bankruptcy

  2025-10-08

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Issues of corporate finance become most critical when a firm encounters financial distress. In this case, there may be insufficient assets to go around, and the question of valuation comes to the fore. Valuation is central to the resolution of distress because distributions consistent with the hierarchy of investor priority (called "absolute priority") depend on the amount available to distribute. A firm with little value may belong entirely to its most senior creditors, while a firm with much value may belong in part to its junior creditors, or perhaps even its shareholders. Not surprisingly, therefore, valuation is the most hotly contested and debated topic in the realm of corporate bankruptcy law. In this Article, we enter this debate with a new "dilution" approach for valuation. The dilution approach begins with the issuance of some new shares to investors at a particular level of priority, and then, to the extent that absolute priority requires, "dilutes" the value of those shares with the issuance of additional shares, or new claims against the firm, to investors at a different level of priority. This process, which is implemented through a stylized auction at a fixed price, not quantity, harnesses information available among a corporation's investors and the capital market as a whole in order to implement better the absolute priority rule.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Secured credit and bankruptcy resolution

  Journal of Empirical Legal Studies · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Security
  • Business
  • Actuarial science

  Abstract Accepted wisdom holds that secured creditors favor liquidation of a debtor in bankruptcy even where the debtor may be more valuable as a going concern. This is false wisdom, however. Holders of senior claims can be expected to favor liquidation prior to a debtor's bankruptcy because the return on such claims are capped by the amount owed while debtor asset values fluctuate. But bankruptcy is a day of reckoning that can eliminate a creditor's exposure to value fluctuation. For this reason, we expect that modern bankruptcy practice, with the secured creditor often firmly in control, does not unduly encourage liquidation. In fact, we expect any bias to favor reorganization, which can be manipulated for the benefit of any party in control of the bankruptcy process. Our results are consistent with this hypothesis. In a broad study of US corporate bankruptcy cases, we find that secured credit is positively and significantly correlated with the reorganization of insolvent debtors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Property Rights in Children

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2020-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In 1978, Dr. Elisabeth Landes and then-Professor, later-Judge Richard Posner, published The Economics of the Baby Shortage. The article openly discussed how economic analysis can address the allocation of babies available for adoption. The ideas expressed in the article were widely denounced as an inhumane commodification of children, something tolerable only in the twisted minds of academic authors. Despite the backlash, an odd thing happened in the more than four decades since Landes and Posner wrote on this topic: their ideas began to take hold. Today, almost all states in the United States permit, in some form, the contractual assignment of parental rights; that is, almost all states now permit the sale of babies. We suggest an ironic reason for the change: the modern technology of in vitro fertilization has quieted or overcome complaints about the commodification of children by moving surrogacy contracts into a longaccepted, though euphemistically labeled, realm of parental property rights in children.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Introduction to the Research Handbook on Corporate Bankruptcy Law

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Law and economics
  • Business

  Today’s leading experts on the law and economics of corporate bankruptcy address fundamental issues such as the efficiency of bankruptcy, the role of creditors in the bankruptcy process, the allocation of going-concern surplus among claimants, the desirability of liquidation in the absence of such surplus, the role of contract in bankruptcy resolution, the role of derivatives in the bankruptcy process, the costs of the bankruptcy system, and the special case of financial institutions, among other topics. This book’s chapters trace the historical path of both law and policy analysis.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Baird and Jackson's Bankruptcy Cases, Problems, and Materials

  2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • History
  • Political Science

  Like the prior edition, this edition retains the casebook's historical attention to the logic and limits of personal and business bankruptcy yet expands the book’s focus to capture the ways that current bankruptcy practice has been fashioned by lawyers and judges. This edition contains a new unit on this summer’s Supreme Court decision in Purdue Pharma, which reshapes the law of third-party releases. Other updates to the book include the addition of the novel LTL Management and National Rifle Association opinions on good-faith filing. Also added is a discussion of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Fulton on the turnover of property as well as discussions of the appellate decisions Weinstein Company on executory contracts, Generation Resources on fraudulent conveyances, and Nuverra on equitable mootness. The new edition of the book will be available for adoption this coming spring semester, while fall adopters of the current edition will be provided with early access to the new Purdue Pharma material as well as edited versions of the LTL and NRA opinions; adopters will be invited to share this advance copy with their students.

  Publisher

• Debt-Equity Conflict and the Incidence of Secured Credit

  The Journal of Law and Economics · 2019-08-01 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Classic finance theory observes that while debt can mitigate the conflict between equity and management, its issuance creates a conflict between debt and equity. We search for evidence of this conflict in the incidence of secured debt, which can be used by financially distressed firms to finance unduly risky projects for the benefit of equity at the expense of unsecured creditors. Skeptics of the debt-equity conflict’s practical importance believe that distressed-firm management avoids secured credit, which may compel equity to relinquish control of a firm. Consistent with the classic account, our controlled study shows a significant run-up of secured credit, as a proportion of assets and of liabilities, prior to bankruptcy filings of publicly traded firms. Together with recent evidence of inefficiency as firms approach bankruptcy, our results support proposals for the subordination of secured debt to nonconsensual claims and for enhanced enforcement of covenants against the issuance of secured credit.

  PublisherDOI

• The Creditors' Bargain Revisited

  University of Pennsylvania Law Review · 2018-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Thirty-six years ago, Tom Jackson suggested that corporate bankruptcy law can best be explained and defended as the terms of an implicit bargain among creditors. 1This assertion is founded on a belief that creditors, as a group, prefer bankruptcy's collective process to a grab race among themselves, particularly when such a race may cause the demise of a viable going concern.Since Jackson's article, scholars have discussed and debated whether creditors need to rely on bankruptcy's bargain for collective action.Some have contended that creditors could in fact contractually arrange for a collective process and that the law should permit them to do so.Others have argued that the impediments to such a contractual arrangement would be too daunting.With rare exception, though, participants in this dialogue assumed that creditors desire some form of collective process, whether provided by statute or contract.That is, while implementation was debated, the collectivization premise went mostly unchallenged.The recent transformation of the bankruptcy process from a forum of reorganization to, largely, an auction block further supports the collectivization premise.A collective process may not seem attractive when it

  Publisher

• Debtor Priority and Options in Bankruptcy: A Policy Intervention

  2017-05-23 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The priority structure of debt claims against business entities is a key feature of corporate finance. The American Bankruptcy Institute’s Commission to Study Reform of Chapter 11 recently recommended that U.S. bankruptcy law grant junior, out-of-the-money creditors a distribution in the reorganization or sale of the debtor. The distribution would reflect the possibility that the value of the debtor enterprise would increase in the three years following bankruptcy. This proposed priority reallocation in favor of junior creditors was at least partly inspired by a series of legal academic articles published over the past fifteen years. In this article, we first review the insights of earlier foundational scholarship regarding the benefits of hierarchical debt contracts and then critique the more recent articles that advocate for deviations from absolute priority, including through an extension of the implicit option held by junior creditors. We suggest that the parties themselves can contract for such adjustments under the limited circumstances in which this would be desirable.

• Patent Exploitation and Modern Antitrust Law: A Special Case for Merger Analysis

  The Institutional Repository at DePaul University (DePaul University) · 2015-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The licensing of patents and the marketing of patented products run afoul, at times, of the antitrust laws. Exploitation of a patent has characteristics similar to the exploitation of monopoly power. The courts have established a rather odd set of rules to limit patent exploitation. The United States Supreme Court, in particular, has applied various, sometimes contradictory, rationales in its rulings. Part I of this article describes some of the Supreme Court case law in this area and offers an alternative economic analysis of patent exploitation. It concludes that the Court, in general, has treated the marketing of patented products and processes too harshly, and, as a result, has lost sight of the purposes of antitrust law in this area. In 1979, the Supreme Court held in Broadcast Music, Inc. v. CBS, that the marketing of blanket licenses for the performance of copyrighted music was not a violation of the antitrust laws. Part II of this article describes how Broadcast Music, though not a patent case, should alter the way the antitrust laws limit patent exploitation. The Court's rationale in Broadcast Music requires courts to take a hard look at a patentee's conduct before allowing the antitrust laws to bite. A patentee's marketing activities, although analogous to monopolistic exploitation, are important production-enhancing elements in the fragile process of creating intellectual property; a process that Congress has specifically sanctioned. Building on the current Justice Department Merger Guidelines, Part III proposes a framework for this "hard look."

  PublisherOA PDF

• Lawyers as lawmakers, privilege, and agency

  International Review of Law and Economics · 2014-01-06 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Alan Schwartz

  Research Network (United States)

  12 shared

• Ben Polak

  Yale University

  10 shared

• Diane Relf

  8 shared

• Alan McDaniel

  Mercy Medical Center

  7 shared

• Vedran Čapkun

  7 shared

• Lawrence A. Weiss

  3 shared

• George G. Triantis

  Stanford Medicine

  3 shared

• Edward R. Morrison

  University of Portsmouth

  2 shared

Education

• B.A.

  Cornell University

  1982

• Other

  University of Chicago Law School

  1985