Collier Compensation, Employment and Appointment of Trustees and Professionals in Bankruptcy Cases

HON. STAN BERNSTEIN serves as a United States Bankruptcy Judge for the Eastern District of New York. His chambers are located in Central Islip, New York, at the Long Island Federal Courthouse. He was appointed for a fourteen-year term by the Court of Appeals of the Second Circuit on November 1, 1996. From November of 1982 to September of 1984, he served as a Bankruptcy Judge for the Eastern District of Michigan (Flint, Bay City and Detroit). Immediately before his 1996 appointment to the bench, he was a partner in the law firm of Foley, Hoag & Eliot, LLP in Boston, Massachusetts, where he chaired the Bankruptcy Group and specialized in reorganizations and workouts. He formerly taught courses on debtor-creditor law, federal courts and the U.C.C. at Wayne State University Law school (1982-89) and frequently lectured on the Bankruptcy Code and the Uniform Commercial Code at the Institute of Continuing Legal Education in Michigan. He also became a member of the I.C.L.E. board of trustees as the state bar representative in 1982.

Judge Bernstein received his B.A. in 1962 from Brandeis University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude with honors in Politics. He also received an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in the same field from Harvard University in 1970. He received his J.D. in 1973 from Rutgers University Law School while a member of the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Science of the University. Upon his appointment to the bench in 1996, he changed his status from active to an inactive member in the Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Michigan and Ohio Bars. He retains his active membership in the American Bankruptcy Institute and the National Conference of Bankruptcy Judges.

The Honorable Maureen A. Tighe is a bankruptcy judge for the Central District of California, currently sitting in Woodland Hills, California. Prior to her appointment to the bench in 2003, she was the United States Trustee for the Central District of California for five years. During that time, she also served at various times as U.S. Trustee in the Districts of Northern, Eastern, and Southern California, Hawaii, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the District of Nevada. From 1988 to 1998, Judge Tighe was an Assistant United States Attorney in Los Angeles, specializing in the prosecution of financial crime, including bankruptcy and consumer frauds. Prior to that, she was in private practice in New York and clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Harold Ackerman in Newark, New Jersey. She has authored numerous reports and articles concerning bankruptcy crimes, bankruptcy petition preparers, parallel proceedings, trustee duties, and identity theft. Judge Tighe received her B.A. with highest honors from Douglass College, and her J.D. with high honors from Rutgers Law School-Newark, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Rutgers Law Review.

Henry J. Sommer is a leading authority on consumer bankruptcy law and has litigated many major cases involving bankruptcy, consumer law, civil rights and other issues. He is the Supervising Attorney at the pro bono Consumer Bankruptcy Assistance Project in Philadelphia and formerly served as the head of the Consumer Law Project at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia. Mr. Sommer has served as a Lecturer-in-Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and is an adjunct professor at Temple University School of Law. Mr. Sommer is the author of Collier Consumer Bankruptcy Practice Guide (Matthew Bender), Consumer Bankruptcy Law and Practice (Nat'l Consumer Law Center), and numerous articles on bankruptcy law. He is co-author of Collier Family Law and the Bankruptcy Code (Matthew Bender). Mr. Sommer is an elected member of the American Law Institute and the National Bankruptcy Conference. In addition, he is an elected Fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy. He is a former president of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, former Chair of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Bankruptcy Conference and a former member of the Federal Reserve Board Consumer Advisory Council. Mr. Sommer was the first recipient of the National Consumer Law Center's Vern Countryman Consumer Law Award. He received his legal education from Harvard Law School (J.D., cum laude).