I am a law professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. Before that I spent twenty-six years as a lawyer and business executive in big law firms and big corporations.
I teach courses in the law of contracts, business associations, and securities regulation.
I write articles that are hard to put in particular boxes, but almost all of them have to do with big questions about how we process information about the world around and make practical decisions. I like to think that I approach it from the "inside-out" rather than the "outside-in." That means that I don't consider myself a behavioralist or observer of others. Rather, I like to think about the inner experience of coming to terms with difficult issues - what it is like to have the experience of making a decision. It's not quite like thinking and it's not quite like acting, but my conclusion is that it's a lot more like acting than thinking. Which means that I have some unusual views about the canard "thinking like a lawyer."
This site has various incarnations of my bios, a compendium of my articles and essays, a section for adopters of my co-authored casebook Unincorporated Business Entities, 5th, and some materials for my students in Business Entity Fundamentals and Contract Law.
I also have pages dedicated to the the pursuit I'm really passionate about: the equestrian discipline of dressage. I realize that for many people (most of my family included) watching dressage is about as exciting as watching water boil, but I first climbed aboard a horse in 2009 at at 55, and in 2012, consistent with my Type-A personality, decided to devote my energies exclusively to dressage riding. Plus it gives people looking at the picture on that page the opportunity to answer the question: "can you identify the horse's patoot?”
During two odd periods of my life, between jobs in 2006 and during the COVID-19 lockdown, I took spent time creating a series of mosaics, which you can see here.
Click on the magazine cover below for a more practice-oriented critique of pure lawyering, inspired by the suggestion that United’s CEO exacerbated the PR crisis by “listening too much to the lawyers."