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 bankruptcy interacts with rules and rights from outside bankruptcy and how investors, lenders, and other actors use corporate and financial law to reallocate value and risk among stakeholders. His scholarship has appeared 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

  • Teaching Fellow - Corporate Governance and Practice LLM and Lecturer in Law, Law Graduate Programs

Professional Education

  • JD, Stanford Law School (2022)
  • AB, Brown University (2017)

Links

2026-27 Courses

Stanford Advisees

  • Master's Program Advisor
    Su Ai, Federica Albano, Luis Enrique Baca, Yi-Ting Chung, Gabriela Costa Samanez, Filippo D'Amato, Andrea Grassi, Joonyoung Kim, Wonsoon Kim, Sophia Lobato, Fernao Mesquita, Swikruti Nayak, Aleksi Nikkanen, Upasana Parakulangara, João Pedro Sciencia Pizarro, Chitrangda Singh, Shuangkexin Wu, Kyeongmi Yoo

All Publications

  • Private Inequity: Better Healthcare Through Business Law Bortner, D. D. 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.

  • Judging Business Judgment: The Federal Common Law of Bankruptcy Transactions in Chapter 11 YALE JOURNAL ON REGULATION Bortner, D. D. 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 Bortner, D. D. 2024; 98 (2)
  • Amending ICSID to Safeguard Indigenous Rights Georgetown Journal of International Law Bortner, D. D. 2021; 52 (4)