An expert in bankruptcy and corporate governance, Yale law professor Alan Schwartz ’61 knows his work relates to the recently approved $700 billion plan to rescue distressed U.S. financial firms.

Like other scholars, though, he’s observing the unprecedented financial events with great respect for their complexity. “If my research could really explain what is going on,” he recently quipped, “I would be a happier guy than I am today.”

Schwartz is the Sterling Professor of Law with appointments in the Yale Law School and School of Management. He’s been ranked in the top half-percent of social scientists worldwide in total citations.

Concerning the rescue plan, with its fat-cat provisions targeting executive compensation, Schwartz is aware that new laws don’t always have their intended results.

Just last year, for example, he sat on a Yale Law School roundtable that discussed efforts to increase corporate transparency; such efforts, in fact, could actually drive up executive compensation.

In 2005, Schwartz and other scholars entered the public arena to criticize changes in bankruptcy laws, making it much harder for individuals to declare Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

At first glance, the change made sense, to force deadbeat spendthrifts to own up to their debts. But Schwartz and other scholars argued that bankruptcy should exist as a kind of consumer “wage insurance,” where people pay high interest rates on consumer loans, like credit cards, as sort of a premium, giving them the right to escape their debts through bankruptcy. Creditors don’t mind, because they were charging high rates to high-risk clients knowing this could occur.

But the law was changed anyway. “Sometimes [scholars] are listened to, and a lot of times we’re not,” Schwartz says.

On successive evenings in February, Bates College presents two lectures by noted scholars from the law schools at Columbia and Yale universities. Both events are open to the public at no cost.

Alan Schwartz, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a member of the Bates class of 1961, offers a talk titled The Economic Rationality Assumption and Its Challengers at 7:30 p.m Wednesday, Feb. 1, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave. Sponsored by the College Key Distinguished Alumni in Residence Program, the lecture is part of a three-day residency at Bates that will bring Schwartz together with faculty and students in a variety of settings.

Patricia Williams, James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, gives a lecture titled Reconstructing Civil Rights for an Uncertain Future at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 2, in the Bates Chapel, College Street. A reception follows. The event is presented by the Bates College Lecture Series.

For more information about both events, call 207-786-6255.

In addition to the public lecture, Schwartz’s Bates residency will include dinners with students and faculty, participation in classes and consulting with students through the career services office. The residency is made possible by the College Key, which honors Bates students and alumni for academic and extracurricular performance, service to the community and strength of character.

Schwartz, who earned a bachelor of science degree in physics at Bates, was a member of one of the two Bates teams that in 1961 pulled off seven straight victories on television’s “College Bowl” quiz show, retiring without a loss as the winningest undefeated school in the history of the 1959-1970 program.

He earned his law degree at Yale and has taught there since 1987. His scholarly interests include commercial law, corporate finance, contracts, product liability, consumer protection and bankruptcy. He joined the Yale law faculty from the California Institute of Technology, where he was professor of law and social science, and from the University of Southern California Law Center, where he was Maurice Jones, Jr. Professor of Law.

Schwartz’s books include Payment Systems and Credit Instruments (with C. Gillette and R. Scott; Foundation Press, 1996) and Foundations of Contract Law (with R. Craswell; Oxford University Press, 1994).

A member of the Columbia Law School faculty since 1991,Williams centers her teaching and research on issues of race and gender. For the magazine The Nation, she writes the column “Diary of a Mad Law Professor,” covering race, gender, the law and other topics.

Williams’ books include The Alchemy of Race and Rights: A Diary of a Law Professor (Harvard University Press, 1991), The Rooster’s Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice (Harvard, 1995) and Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).

A native of Boston and a graduate of Wellesley College and Harvard University Law School, Williams practiced as a deputy city attorney for the city of Los Angeles and as a staff lawyer for the Western Center on Law and Poverty, in California. She has served on the faculties of the law schools at the University of Wisconsin, City University of New York and Golden Gate University. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as a “genius award.”