The University of Texas at Austin   School of Law

Education

• JD Harvard
• BA Brown University

Professor Littwin studies bankruptcy, consumer, and commercial law from an empirical perspective. Most recently, she has written about pro se filers in bankruptcy and the relationship between consumer credit and domestic violence. She was one of the principal investigators on the 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project, which has been the leading study of consumer bankruptcy for the past 25 years.

Littwin received her undergraduate degree from Brown University and graduated from Harvard Law School in 2002. After law school, she clerked for the Honorable Rosemary Barkett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and founded ROAD (Reaching Out About Depression), a community-organizing project for low-income women. Prior to her appointment at the University of Texas School of Law, she was a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. She joined the UT faculty in 2008.

Littwin teaches bankruptcy, secured credit, and a seminar on the regulation of credit cards.

Recent Publications

• The Do-It-Yourself Mirage: Complexity in the Bankruptcy System, in Broke: How Debt Bankrupts the Middle Class at 157 (Katherine Porter, ed., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).
• The Affordability Paradox: How Consumer Bankruptcy's Greatest Weakness May Account for Its Surprising Success, 52 William and Mary Law Review 1933 (2011). <http://ssrn.com/author=736604>
• Republicans Coddle Banks at Consumer Expense, Bloomberg, May 9, 2010. <http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=au2dkonlwlFY>

Full list of publications…

Recent Activities

• Research Presentation

  2008

  University of Texas-Harvard Joint Conference on Commercial Law Realities

  Selected to present an overview of the Bankruptcy Internet Data Project at invitation-only conference for junior scholars in commercial law. Hosted jointly by Harvard Law School and University of Texas Law School.

• Paper Presentation

  2007

  Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association

  Presented Beyond Usury: A Study of Credit Card Use and Preference Among Low-Income Consumers at Humboldt University, Berlin.

• Paper Presentation

  2007

  University of Texas-Harvard Joint Conference on Commercial Law Realities

  Selected to present Testing the Substitution Hypothesis: Would Credit Card Regulation Force Low-Income Borrowers Into Less Desirable Lending Alternatives? at invitation-only conference for junior scholars in commercial law. Hosted jointly by Harvard Law School and University of Texas Law School.

Full activities list…