William Organek is a Program Fellow with the Harvard Law School Bankruptcy Project, and also serves as the Managing Editor for the Harvard Law School Bankruptcy Roundtable. His research investigates bankruptcy's operation as a system of public law regulation and private law ordering. He develops case studies with a blend of empirical analysis and insights from law and economics, drawing on his legal and business experience in bankruptcy and real estate. By probing the users of, uses for, and limits of the bankruptcy system, his research aims to assess how insolvency law can be optimized for the wide variety of public and private cases to which it is applied.
His current work, entitled Mass Tort Bankruptcy Goes Public, highlights the growth of government intervention in bankruptcies caused by mass tort liability and reveals the conflicts of interest raised by governments' simultaneous roles as creditors, representatives, and sovereigns. His previous article, entitled "A Bitter Result": Purdue Pharma, a Sackler Bankruptcy Filing, and Improving Monetary and Nonmonetary Recoveries in Mass Tort Bankruptcies, will be published in the peer-reviewed American Bankruptcy Law Journal. Future work will examine the use of municipal bankruptcy by entities that are only nominally public, insolvency in the legal cannabis industry, and bankruptcy's purpose as a set of powers and procedures that cannot be replicated by contract.
Prior to joining Harvard, William spent several years working as an attorney at international law firms, with particular focus on real estate and bankruptcy law. He also spent several years living in China, where he started a business to attract Chinese investment into real estate projects in the United States.
William earned his B.A. in Economics-Philosophy from Columbia University, and his J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School.