China Summer Program in Beijing

Faculty and Directors

Michael A. Gerber
Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Development

B.A., New York University
J.D., New York University School of Law

Michael A. Gerber, the on-site Faculty Director of the 2009 Beijing Summer Abroad Program,
teaches bankruptcy, business reorganizations, and contracts at Brooklyn Law School, where he is a Professor of Law and Associate Dean. He is the author of Business Reorganizations (LexisNexis) a Chapter 11 casebook used in law schools throughout the United States, and he is a contributing author of Collier on Bankruptcy, the leading treatise on bankruptcy law. He has written and lectured on corporate governance in bankruptcy, bankruptcy ethics, the treatment of intellectual property interests in bankruptcy, dot-com bankruptcies, international and comparative insolvency law, and other business bankruptcy and reorganization topics. He has practiced law with Proskauer Rose LLP and Brown Raysman & Millstein LLP. He has served on the Merit Selection Panel for a Bankruptcy Judge in the Eastern District of New York, and on the Committee on Bankruptcy and Corporate Reorganization of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

Janet Ainsworth
Professor of Law

B.A., magna cum laude, Brandeis University
M.A. Yale University
J.D., cum laude, Harvard Law School

Janet Ainsworth is the John D. Eshelman Professor of Law at Seattle University, where she has taught since 1988 and has been chosen as Teacher of the Year three times. One area of her research interests is comparative law. and her research on Chinese law has appeared in such journal s as the Cornell Law Review, the Hastings Law Journal, and the Washington University Law Quarterly.

Arthur R. Pinto
Professor of Law

A.B., Colgate University
J.D., New York University School of Law

Professor Pinto is co-director of the Beijing Summer Program, Professor of Law and co-director of The Dennis J. Block Center for the Study of International Business Law at Brooklyn Law School. His area of expertise is in United States and comparative corporate law, which he has explored in his writings and having served as the National Reporter for the Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law. He has been a visiting lecturer on American corporate and securities law at LUISS University in Rome, and serves on the editorial board of the International and Comparative Law Journal. He is the co-author of Understanding Corporate Law (2d ed. 2004) (with D. Branson), the co-editor of The Legal Basis of Comparative Corporate Governance in Publicly Held Corporations (1998), and author of several law review articles. He has been a visiting professor at New York University and George Washington Law School. Prior to joining the faculty in 1983, Professor Pinto taught at Seton Hall University School of Law and was an associate with the firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges. He is the director of Brooklyn Law School's Summer Abroad Programs.

Peter Tiersma
Professor of Law and Joseph Scott Fellow
Director of International Programs

BA, with distinction, Stanford University, Phi Beta Kappa
JD, University of California Berkeley, Order of the Coif
PhD, University of California San Diego

Peter Tiersma is Director of International Programs at Loyola Law School. He was born in the Netherlands and immigrated with his parents to the United States. Following graduation from Stanford University, he was a Fulbright Fellow to the Netherlands and later received a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, San Diego. Subsequently, he obtained a J.D. from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California in Berkeley. He clerked for Justice Stanley Mosk of the California Supreme Court, worked in private practice for three years, and has been teaching at Loyola Law School since 1990. Tiersma is the author of the books Frisian Reference Grammar (Fryske Akademy, 1999), Legal Language (University of Chicago Press, 1999), and Speaking of Crime: The Language of Criminal Justice (co-authored with Lawrence Solan, University of Chicago Press, 2005). He has written several articles on the relationship between language and law. Tiersma has also lectured widely on these topics, most recently in Germany and China.