Dolan Bortner
Teaching Fellow - Corporate Governance and Practice LLM and Lecturer in Law
Law Graduate Programs
Bio
Dolan Bortner is a Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law in the LLM Program in Corporate Governance and Practice. He studies corporate law and bankruptcy. His current work examines how the objectives of these fields affect and are affected by government intervention in private markets, congressional legislation, and appellate review. His scholarship has been published or is forthcoming in the Iowa Law Review, the Yale Journal on Regulation, the peer-reviewed American Bankruptcy Law Journal, and the Georgetown Journal of International Law.
Before joining the CGP Program, Dolan was a member of the Restructuring Practice at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP and the General Practice at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. He also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Jay S. Bybee of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Dolan received his JD from Stanford Law School, where he was an articles editor on the Stanford Law Review. He received his AB with Honors in International Relations, magna cum laude, from Brown University.
Academic Appointments
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Lecturer, Law Graduate Programs
Professional Education
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JD, Stanford Law School (2022)
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AB, Brown University (2017)
Stanford Advisees
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Yuqing Liu, Luis Roquette Geraldes -
Master's Program Advisor
Ali AlAraifi, Guylian-Antoine Bouffioux, Laura Capellão, Lydia Chikhi, Kana Dainaka, Patricio Danel Gonzalez, Lilia Djebbouri, Yingqi Gu, Mariam Hovsepyan, Caiyue Huang, Taruni Kavuri, Mrida Lakhmani, Alessandro Meyer, James Nuwagaba, Priyal Rashes Sanghvi, Lejla Tuholjakovic, Maria Vargas, Berangere de Conihout
All Publications
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Private Inequity: Better Healthcare Through Business Law
Iowa Law Review.
2027
Abstract
Private equity (“PE”)-backed hospitals are growing, going bankrupt, and reporting deaths all at rates that outstrip their peers. These problems raise special concern in rural and low-income markets, where PE is overrepresented and alternative providers are scant. Further, they are front-page news after the bankruptcies of two of the largest PE-backed hospitals, Steward Health and Prospect Medical, within a single year. Unless poor service and distress somehow benefit a hospital’s owners, however, why should these cases suggest anything but tragic mistakes? This Article provides a novel economic account of how PE profits by driving hospitals not into bankruptcy, but to the brink. In underserved markets, fixed reimbursement rates spur PE to divert cash from care and into financing dividends with debt. Low competition allows it to do so without losing patients. Lenders expect to profit from financing these dividends, and regulators step aside when PE owners wield the power to close a town’s only hospital. Since other hospitals generally lack the ability or the incentive to pay debt-funded dividends, the problems these payments invite arise not from market conditions alone but from how PE operates within them. Having diagnosed the failure of PE-backed hospitals as a business problem, this Article proposes business-law solutions, drawing from tax, leveraged finance, and bankruptcy. Low-income and rural patients should not have to choose between low quality and nothing. Regulation that internalizes PE’s externalities, without sacrificing operational profit, can ensure they never do.
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Judging Business Judgment: The Federal Common Law of Bankruptcy Transactions in Chapter 11
YALE JOURNAL ON REGULATION
2026; 43 (2): 253-334
View details for Web of Science ID 001697534100001
- Mind the Gap: Fighting Forum Shopping in Transnational Bankruptcies Under Chapter 15 American Bankruptcy Law Journal 2024; 98 (2)
- Amending ICSID to Safeguard Indigenous Rights Georgetown Journal of International Law 2021; 52 (4)