Prof. Gilbert Marcus Cole

Marcus Cole is a leading scholar of the empirical law and economics of commerce and finance, and teaches courses in the areas of Bankruptcy, Banking, Contracts, and Venture Capital. Professor Cole’s writings have explored questions such as why corporate bankruptcies are increasingly filed in Delaware, and what drives the financial structure of firms backed by venture capital. His current research interests involve the ways in which the world’s poor are using technology to solve their own problems, often in the face of government restrictions hindering such solutions. Professor Cole has served as a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and is a Fellow at the University of Amsterdam Center for Law and Economics. He has been a Visiting Professor at a number of institutions around the world, including the University of Amsterdam, the University of Vienna, the University of Leiden, Bucerius University in Hamburg, Germany, Northwestern University, Korea University, and Peking University School of Transnational Law in Shenzhen. Professor Cole has also served on the boards of several civic and charitable organizations, including that of the Central Pacific Region of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and Businesses United in Lending and Development (“BUILD”). He currently serves on the Editorial Board of the Cato Supreme Court Review, the Academic Advisory Board of Bar-Bri, the Advisory Board of the Independent Institute’s Center on Culture and Civil Society, and is President of the Board of Directors of Rocketship Education, a national, non-profit charter school network, operating California’s most successful charter schools for low-income children. Before joining the Stanford Law faculty in 1997, Professor Cole was an associate with the Chicago law firm of Mayer Brown, and he clerked for Judge Morris Sheppard Arnold of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.