Professor Ronald Mann, ’85
Renowned commercial law scholar Ronald Mann, ’85, will rejoin the University of Texas Law School faculty in 2011. He is currently a professor at Columbia Law School.
“Ronald Mann is one of the leading commercial law scholars of his generation,” said Dean Larry Sager. “His interests include many matters of urgent concern and interest—for example, the credit card industry, e-commerce, and the role of patents in modern commercial enterprise. He would be a great hire for any law school. His return to us from Columbia is a great capstone to a remarkable year of faculty hiring at UT Law.”
Mann is a nationally recognized scholar in the fields of commercial law and electronic commerce. His acclaimed 2006 book, Charging Ahead: the Growth and Regulation of Payment Card Markets, was the first in-depth examination of credit card use in the global economy. In the Michigan Law Review, reviewer Katherine Porter wrote: “...the book manages to be provocative without resort to polemic. Even rarer, Charging Ahead reveals how payment systems law—perhaps the most esoteric topic in the already esoteric world of commercial law—shapes our society and its pursuit of the good life.”
Author of a widely used commercial law casebook, Payment Systems and Other Financial Transactions: Cases, Materials, and Problems, Mann also wrote the first legal casebook on electronic commerce, Electronic Commerce. He also has contributed dozens of articles to the field, on topics ranging from commercial and consumer finance to the rise of the internet and the software industry.
“He burst into scholarly prominence with path breaking empirical work on the role that secured finance serves in commercial lending,” said Jay Westbrook, the Benno C. Schmidt Chair of Business Law at the School of Law. “His contributions to the field are nothing short of remarkable. It will be great to welcome back the best student I ever had.”
His return to the University of Texas is a homecoming: he earned his JD in 1985 at the Law School, where he was a member of Chancellors and managing editor of the Texas Law Review. Following graduation, he clerked for Judge Joseph T. Sneed on the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals and Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court. After three years in private practice, he worked for four years at the Justice Department as an assistant for the solicitor general of the United States. In his time there, he became an accomplished appellate advocate, arguing ten cases in the United States Supreme Court, including a trilogy of major bankruptcy cases.
When he left the Justice Department in 1994, he turned his talents to teaching and scholarship. In 2003, he joined the faculty of UT Law, where he served until 2007, before moving to Columbia Law School.
While at UT Law, Mann founded and was co-director of the Center for Law, Business and Economics. He is a member of the American Law Institute and recently served as the reporter for the amendments to Articles 3 and 4 of the Uniform Commercial Code.
Mann’s decision to return to Austin from New York caps a remarkably strong hiring season for UT Law. Also joining the faculty in coming months are Ronen Avraham and Abraham Wickelgren from Northwestern University Law School; Robert Chesney from the Wake Forest University School of Law; and David Adelman from the Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona.
Contact:
Kirston Fortune, UT Law Communications, 512-471-7330, kfortune@law.utexas.edu