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.