
Professor Rowley graduated Phi Beta Kappa from
Baylor University, majoring in economics and political science.
After earning his M.P.P. from Harvard University's
Kennedy School of
Government, he returned to Baylor (in the latter stages of
the last Great Recession) to teach a variety of economics courses and
team-teach a course in American public policy.
He later earned his J.D. from the
University of Texas School of Law, where he
served as executive
editor of the
Texas Law Review and was a judicial intern to then-Texas
Supreme Court Justice
(now U.S. Representative)
Lloyd A. Doggett. Following a clerkship with Judge
Thomas M. Reavley of the U.S. Fifth
Circuit Court of Appeals, he
practiced law in Houston for five years, with an emphasis on commercial
and appellate litigation in federal and state trial courts.
Before joining the Boyd
School of Law faculty in 2001, Professor Rowley taught at
Mississippi College
School of Law and
Emory University School of Law. He spent the 2007-08 academic year
as the Charles E. Tweedy, Jr. Visiting Chairholder at
The University of
Alabama School of Law. He was appointed a William S. Boyd
Professor of Law in 2008.
Teaching
Professor Rowley is teaching
Sales & Leases (including international and
electronic sales) and Secured Transactions this fall; next spring he
will teach Contracts. In the
prior three academic years, he also taught Contract Theory & Policy, Economics and the Law,
and Payment Systems, and team-taught (with
Professor Nancy B. Rapoport) a
limited-enrollment Law and Popular Culture colloquium.
In 2003, he
inaugurated
the law school's
Law and
Popular Culture Film Series, which he
continues
to organize
and host when student, faculty, and alumni interest is sufficient
to support it, and for which he frequently leads the post-film discussions.
He has published teaching materials to
accompany three leading undergraduate and MBA-level business law texts,
as well as earlier editions of a popular introductory macro- and
microeconomics text and a more advanced text on money, banking, and the
U.S. economy.
He has also
written interactive teaching materials for the
Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction
(CALI).
Scholarship
Professor Rowley currently writes primarily in the areas of
contract law, commercial law, and law and popular culture. He has previously
published several
articles on
state securities law and contributed to, edited, and updated a
five-volume set of books on business and commercial litigation. In
his "prior life" as an economist, he published several articles and
essays, mostly on domestic and international economic policy, and wrote
introductions for, contributed a chapter to, and co-edited a book of readings on
international economic relations.
His recent articles and essays have appeared
or are forthcoming in the Business Lawyer, Michigan Law Review, Nevada Law Journal, SMU Law Review,
South Texas Law Review, Uniform Commercial Code Law Journal,
and
Lawyers in Your Living Room! Law on Television (Michael Asimow ed.
2009). He is the author of
Questions & Answers:
Contracts (LexisNexis 2003, 1st
rev. ed. 2006 & 2d ed. forthcoming 2012), two chapters for Howard O. Hunter's
Modern Law of Contracts
(West 3d ed. rev. 2007-10), Inside Secured Transactions: What
Matters and Why? (Aspen forthcoming 2012),
Questions & Answers: Sales, Leases, and Electronic Contracts
(LexisNexis forthcoming 2012), and a co-author of Global Issues in Contract
Law (West 2007) and several cumulative annual supplements to Howard O. Hunter's
Modern Law of Contracts. He has
helped organize print symposia for the Tulane Law Review and
Ohio State Law Journal.
Professor Rowley frequently appears as a presenter or discussant at academic symposia,
conferences, and colloquia, including the
University of Chicago Law School's 2008 symposium on Fault in Contract Law,
the 2009 Law and Society Association Annual Meeting, the 2009
Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, the 2010 Annual
Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS), the
Saltman Center for Conflict Resolution's 2010 Conference on Conflict
Resolution and the Economic Crisis. In February 2010, he organized,
hosted, and spoke at the
2010 Spring Conference on Contracts,
which drew more than 80 academics and practitioners from thirty-one
states and several foreign countries to UNLV's campus for two full days
of programs. In November 2010, he presented a
faculty enrichment talk at the University of Tulsa College of Law on The Polyform
Commercial Code.
2011 has been and will continue to be a very active year. For January's
AALS annual meeting in San Francisco, Professor Rowley organized and introduced two roundtable discussions
comprising the program Navigating Lombard Street in a Fog: Seeking
(and Ignoring) Landmarks of Intent and Context, also chairing and
serving as a discussant for the second roundtable. In February, he presented
Polyform Commercial Law at the
6th International Contracts Conference,
at Stetson University College of Law. In March, he presented
the latest version of One Elle: Images of the Law Student in American
Popular Culture,
chaired a panel on The Theatre of Law, and served as chair and
discussant for a panel on Film on Trial at the
Association for the Study of Law,
Culture, and the Humanities
annual meeting. In early June, he presented the most recent
version of Contracts Illustrated: Using Popular Culture to Teach
Contract Law, moderated a panel on Regulation and Governance in
the Public Interest, and discussed junior scholars'
works-in-progress in a roundtable format at the
Law and Society Association annual
meeting in San
Francisco. In late July,
Professor Rowley
presented an updated and expanded
version of Polyform Commercial Law at
Public and Private Law
— Intersections in Law and Method, which the TC Beirne School
of Law, University of Queensland, hosted in Brisbane, Australia.
In early September, he offered an American perspective on Narrowing the Gap in Commercial Law Between Practice
and Academia, as part of the
Society of Legal Scholars 2011 Annual Conference,
in Cambridge, England, and chaired the
Contract, Commercial, and Consumer Law Section
breakout panels on contract and consumer law. Immediately thereafter, he
traveled to Sheffield, England, for a two-day transatlantic contracts
conference that he jointly organized with University of Sheffield
professors Qi Zhou and Séverine Saintier, and with whom (and University
of Florida professor Larry A. DiMatteo) he will co-edit
the resulting essay collection for publication. In October,
Professor Rowley served as a session chair and discussant for
Empirical and Lyrical: Revisiting the Contracts
Scholarship of Stewart Macaulay at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
(Space permitting, he will contribute a brief essay to the resulting
book.) In November, he will
present How the CISG is Pro-Seller
and Pro-Buyer at the University of Florida's The Global Challenges of
International Sales Law. An edited version of that paper will appear in a
follow up book that Cambridge University Press will publish in 2012.
Increasingly sought after for his expertise in law and popular
culture, Professor Rowley was one of twelve "jurors" for an August 2009
ABA Journal cover article on "The
25 Greatest Legal TV Shows." He served in
a similar capacity for an August 2010 ABA Journal cover
article on "The 25 Greatest Fictional Lawyers
(Who Are Not Atticus Finch)" and a subsequent National Jurist article on
the best TV law shows. He is also
contributing a chapter on popular culture images of the law to a
forthcoming treatise on legal semiotics, an invited response to an
essay in the San Diego Law Review about the greatest legal movie
ever, and an essay on teaching contracts using popular culture to
a forthcoming law review symposium issue or a new book collecting essays
on contracts pedagogy.
In the cybersphere,
Professor Rowley is a contributing editor of
the Law Professors' Blog Network's
ContractsProf Blog and is one of the founding contributors to the Jurisdynamics Network's
Commercial Law blog. He has also
contributed to the Pace
Institute of International Commercial
Law's
CISG Database — the leading U.S.-based
resource for academics, judges, practitioners, and students interested
in the U.N. Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods
(CISG).
Service
Professor Rowley is an elected member of the
American Law Institute and serves or
has served on
the Members Consultative Groups for the Principles of the Law of
Liability Insurance, Principles of the Law of Software Contracts,
the Restatement (Third) of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment, and the
UCC Article 9 Joint Review Committee.
Professor Rowley chaired the AALS
Section on Commercial and Related Consumer Law
in 2009
and is chairing the AALS
Section on Contracts
in 2011.
He is the Developments
Reporter for the
ABA Business Law Section's
Uniform Commercial Code Committee, having previously served a
three-year term as co-chair of the Sale of Goods Subcommittee.
During the 2005 legislative session, Professor Rowley advised the Nevada Senate Judiciary Committee regarding proposals to
revise Nevada's Uniform
Commercial Code.
Prior to and during the 2011 session, he consulted with the
State Bar of Nevada's Business Law Section leaders about the UCC
Article 9 Joint Review Committee's
proposed amendments. He has consulted with legislators,
legislative staff, state bar
leaders, and other interested parties regarding efforts in Connecticut,
Florida, Indiana, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah,
Washington, and Wisconsin to revise UCC Article 1, amend UCC Articles 2
and 2A, or amend UCC Article 9. His periodic legislative updates on
the 2001 revision to UCC Article 1, the 2003 amendments to UCC Articles 2 and 2A,
the 2002 amendments to UCC Articles 3 and 4, and the 2003 revision to
UCC Article 7
— which he maintains on this
web site and about which he writes for the
ContractsProf and
Commercial Law blogs,
his ABA web site, and several e-mail list serves — provide
additional service to the practicing and academic bars and to the broader
legal community.
Professor Rowley
edits the
Social Science Research Network's
UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law Legal Studies
Research Paper Series.
Until early 2007, he maintained
the law school's
Faculty
Publications list and periodically published the
BSL Faculty News,
which he launched in October 2002.

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