Michael McMillen

Michael is a partner of Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle, LLP. He is located primarily in the New York office but works from offices across the globe. His primary areas of practice are finance and investment, especially Islamic finance and investment (since 1996) and project, infrastructure, and equipment finance (since 1983). He is recognized internationally for development of many first-of-a-kind structures for Islamic finance and investment transactions, for analytical and legislative work in introducing Islamic banking and finance into African and Asian countries, and for cross-border transactional work. He has served as a member of substantive-topic Islamic finance committees of Islamic Development Bank, Islamic Financial Services Board, World Bank, International Swaps and Derivatives Association, and central banks and securities regulators of numerous countries, among others. Michael has also served as an expert witness on Islamic finance in litigation matters 
and before prominent Shari’ah boards.

Michael teaches a semester-long Islamic finance at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School (since 2006). He has taught topically-focused Islamic finance and investment classes at the Wharton School, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, the University of California Berkley School of Law, the Harvard Law School, the New York University School of Law, the Wisconsin Law School, the Kazbuu University (Kazakhstan), the University of Nairobi Kenya, the PRIMED School, Università degli Studi dell’Insubria – Como, the University of Sharjah, the Concordia College, and other academic, commercial, and financial institutions throughout the world. Michael serves as an editor of “The Arab Law Quarterly”.

Michael’s many awards and recognitions for work in Islamic finance and investment include Euromoney’s Best Legal Advisor Award (twice) and the Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum Award for Best Special Contributions to Islamic Finance. Michael twice served as Chair (and was the founding Chair) of the Islamic Law Section, a division of the International Law Section of the American Bar Association. Euromoney Magazine identified Michael as one of the eighteen pioneers of Islamic finance globally.

Books authored by Michael include “Islamic Finance and the Shari’ah”, “The History of Equipment Finance” (six volumes), two exploring mysteries of railroad history (“Lost in Florida” and “Tracks of the Mohegan”), and nine on Islamic finance topics for an English academic institution. He has authored dozens of book chapters and papers on Islamic finance and been a speaker at over a hundred Islamic finance programs and seminars. Michael is an elected member of The Lexington Group, Inc. (for Transportation History).

Michael received his Doctor of Medicine from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York in 1982, his Juris Doctor from the Wisconsin Law School in 1976, and his Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 1972.