Janis Penton

Janis Penton recently retired after 40 years representing financial institutions as a partner in private law firms and in-house, most recently as associate general counsel at MUFG Union Bank. Penton is an expert on bank trust and securities activities, a highly regarded public finance professional and recognized for her knowledge of letters of credit.

Penton chairs the American Bar Association’s Law School Teaching Subcommittee and is the programming director of the Committee on Trust Indentures and Indenture Trustees. She was the secretary of the Article 5 Task Force, sponsored by the American Bar Association and the International Financial Services Association, that provided the basis for revision of letter of credit law; was a drafter of the California legislative analysis for UCC Article 5 adoption; and was a member of the drafting committee for the International Standby Practices (ISP 98).

Penton is a past chair of the American Bar Association’s Trust & Investment Services Subcommittee; Letters of Credit Subcommittee; and Working Group on International Letters of Credit and Bank Guarantees. She is a fellow of the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers and a member of the editorial advisory board of Documentary Credit World. She serves on the advisory council of the Center for Transnational Law and Business at the USC Gould School of Law.

Penton received her BA from UCLA and her MBA and JD degrees from USC, where she was a member of the Southern California Law Review and Order of the Coif. Following law school, she clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. 

FACULTY IN THE NEWS

Bloomberg Tax
September 22, 2020
Re: Nomi Stolzenberg

Nomi Stolzenberg was quoted in an article about whether or not religious judges can keep their faith separate from their rulings. Stolzenberg said, “[Amy Barrett] is being selected to fulfill a half century campaign to take back the courts, to return religion to the public square, to dismantle a style of secularist constitutional interpretation that religious conservatives find objectionable."

RECENT SCHOLARSHIP

Jonathan Barnett
July, 2020

"Lessons from Luckin Coffee: The Underappreciated Risks of Variable Interest Entities," Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog, July 28, 2020.

Jonathan Barnett
July, 2020

"Big is not necessarily bad," The Hill, July 30, 2020.

Edward McCaffery
July, 2020

“The Death of the Income Tax (or, The Rise of America's Universal Wage Tax),” Indiana Law Journal  95 (2020): 1233.