Andrea Coles-Bjerre

Prof. Andrea Coles-Bjerre is associate professor of law and faculty director of the Business Law Program at the University of Oregon School of Law in Eugene, where she teaches and writes in the fields of bankruptcy and civil procedure, often using insights from cognitive linguistics to critique legal rules and the process of judicial decisionmaking. She received the Orlando J. Hollis Award for Excellence in Teaching. After finishing law school, Prof. Coles-Bjerre clerked for two years for U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Jerome Feller of the Eastern District of New York and practiced for six years with the law firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy in New York, where she was the lead associate in a variety of complex chapter 11 and other insolvency matters, including the representation of an investor group that acquired New York City’s Rockefeller Center, and the institutional noteholders in the reorganization of the Phar-Mor chain of drugstores (one of history’s more notorious bankruptcy fraud cases). She has been a member of the Oregon faculty since 1996. Prof. Coles-Bjerre is a peer reviewer for the American Bankruptcy Law Journal and has been a visiting faculty member at Brooklyn Law School. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Law and Interpretation. Prof. Coles-Bjerre received her B.A. magna cum laude from Barnard College in 1984 and her J.D. from Brooklyn Law School in 1987.