Neil B. Cohen is the Jeffrey D. Forchelli Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School,
where he teaches courses in domestic and international commercial law, contracts, and
constitutional law. Professor Cohen has been a member of the faculty at Brooklyn Law
School since 1985; prior to that, he was a Professor of Law at Seton Hall University
School of Law. He was a Visiting Professor at Columbia Law School in 1994-1995.
For over 15 years, Professor Cohen has been a key participant in major domestic and
international law reform projects with respect to commercial transactions and currently
serves as the Director of Research of the Permanent Editorial Board for the Uniform
Commercial Code. He was the Reporter for the American Law Institute's Restatement of
the Law of Suretyship and Guaranty, which was published in 1996; in honor of his
accomplishments as Reporter, he was named the American Law Institute's R. Ammi
Cutter Reporter in 1994. Professor Cohen was the Reporter for Revised Article 1 of the
Uniform Commercial Code (a joint project of the American Law Institute and the National
Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws). In addition, Professor Cohen was a
member of the Drafting Committee that prepared Revised Article 9 of Uniform Commercial
Code, and chaired that committee's Task Force on International Secured Transactions;
he was also a member of the Drafting Committee revised Articles 2 and 2A of the Uniform
Commercial Code. Professor Cohen has served as Special Consultant to the New York Law
Revision Commission regarding Uniform Commercial Code Articles 2A, 3, and 4. He is also
an adviser for the American Law Institute's Principles of the Law of Software
Contracts.
In the international arena, Professor Cohen has been active in the modernization,
harmonization, and internationalization of the law governing secured credit. He has
served as a member of the United States delegation to the United Nations Commission on
International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) in conjunction with its preparation of the United
Nations Convention on the Assignment of Receivables in International Trade, and now
serves as a member of the United States delegation to the UNCITRAL Working Group for its
broader work regarding secured credit reform. In both projects, he has been designated as
a consulting expert by UNCITRAL. Professor Cohen has also participated with the World
International Property Organization (WIPO) in its efforts to coordinate international
developments in secured transactions in intellectual property and with the International
Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) with respect to its efforts to
develop a model law of leasing. He has served as Consultant to the Center for Economic
Analysis of Law (regarding law reform in Bolivia and Thailand) and as Participating
Scholar for the Commercial Law Project for Ukraine.
Professor Cohen is a Fellow of the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers and a
member of the American Law Institute. He is a well-known lecturer on commercial law
issues and author or co-author of books and articles concerning domestic and
international commercial law, including the Hawkland UCC Series (volumes analyzing
Revised Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code), and a bi-monthly Commercial Law column
for the New York Law Journal, as well as over a dozen articles in major law reviews.
In addition to his expertise in domestic and international commercial law, Professor
Cohen has written numerous law review articles in areas as diverse as bankruptcy, medical
malpractice, probability and statistics, and baseball and the law. He is a co-author of
What If the American Political System Were Different? (1992), and co-editor of Baseball
and the American Legal Mind (Garland 1995). Professor Cohen received an S.B. from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a J.D. from New York University School of Law,
where he was a Root-Tilden Scholar.
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