A Legal Podcast Not (Just) for Lawyers
Purdue Pharma reaped millions in profits from sales of their blockbuster painkiller, OxyContin. The company’s owners, members of the billionaire Sackler family, are now trying to use bankruptcy court to shield their ill-gotten wealth from creditors — and forever silence survivors of the overdose epidemic. Tune in for this crazy and important story. You’ll never find bankruptcy boring again.
Meet your Co-Hosts!
Professor Jonathan Lipson
Jonathan Lipson holds the Harold E. Kohn Chair and is a Professor of Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law. He teaches Contracts, Bankruptcy, Corporations, Commercial Law, Lawyering for Entrepreneurship, International Business Transactions, and a variety of other business law courses. In addition to Temple, he has taught at the law schools of the University of Wisconsin (where he held the Foley & Lardner Chair), the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Baltimore.
His research focuses on corporate governance, reorganization, and contracting practices. He has published in many of the nation’s top law reviews, including those of the UCLA, Boston University, Notre Dame, and Southern California law schools. His work is frequently cited, including by the United States Supreme Court and U.S. Courts of Appeals, as well as leading business courts such as the Delaware Supreme Court, the Delaware Chancery Court and the Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. He is also a coauthor (with Macaulay et al.) of Contracts Law in Action, the nation’s leading casebook that takes a “law in action” approach to contract law. He published the first paper identifying and conceptualizing the phenomenon of “contract (as) social responsibility.”
An occasional empiricist, Professor Lipson has published two articles on the use of “examiners” in chapter 11 bankruptcies, the second of which won the Editors’ Prize as the best paper published in the American Bankruptcy Law Journal in 2016. His study of employment at the Trump Casinos in connection with their bankruptcies received widespread attention, and was noted in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Professor Lipson is a member of the American Law Institute, a Regent of the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers, and is active with the Business Law Section of the American Bar Association.
Professor Lipson represented a Purdue Pharma creditor in the bankruptcy proceeding: Peter Jackson, whose daughter Emily Jackson suffered a fatal OxyContin overdose at age 18.
Charlotte Bismuth
Charlotte Bismuth (she/her) is an activist, author, former prosecutor, legalese translator and occasional cartoonist. New York Times bestselling author Beth Macy called her memoir, Bad Medicine (Simon & Schuster), “a bold and cinematic true-crime story about her work at the intersection of medicine and greed.” As an Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan Bismuth (formerly Fishman) and her team successfully prosecuted the landmark case of Dr. Stan Li, the first doctor in New York state to be charged with and convicted for the overdose deaths of his patients. She is a graduate of Columbia College, Columbia Law, and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (“Sciences Po”) in Paris. Charlotte lives in New York City with her family.