Riz holds the Chair of Law and Legal Theory at University College London (UCL) (UK) and is a Visiting Professor at the University of Florence (Italy). He received his Ph.D. from UCL, his BCL Honours from Oxford University (UK), his LLB Honours from UCL and his BSc in Mathematics, Statistics, Economics from the Government College Lahore, Punjab University (Pakistan). His scholarship on bankruptcy, financial sector regulation, property and trusts, and legal theory has influenced law reform in the UK, and has been cited with approval by several courts. He has also practised as a barrister from South Square Chambers in London, advising on insolvency, restructuring, trust and property law issues in England and several British Commonwealth jurisdictions. From 2009-2013, Riz was Senior Counsel to the World Bank, and headed the Bank’s Global Initiative on Insolvency and Creditor/Debtor Regimes. Since then, he has served as Senior Law Reform Consultant to the Bank. In these capacities, he has advised the governments of some twenty countries in Africa, Asia, and Europe on reform of insolvency and creditor/debtor systems, involving policy analyses of national legal and regulatory regimes, helping national authorities to rewrite legislation and strengthen judicial capacity, and engagement with the full range of stakeholders. Since 2009, Riz has been an active participant of the World Bank’s and then the UK’s delegations to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law, working on the bankruptcy of cross-border enterprise groups, the duties of directors in the period approaching bankruptcy, and the enforcement of bankruptcy-derived orders and judgments.

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