Keith A. Rowley

What’s the most important thing you are working on right now?

As a Uniform Law Commissioner, I helped draft the Uniform Regulation of Virtual Currency Businesses Act (RVCBA) and now serve on the enactment committee for the RVCBA and the drafting committee for a companion act that will more closely harmonize virtual currency business user protections with those the Uniform Commercial Code provides for customers of securities and commodities intermediaries. Businesses that hold their customers’ virtual currencies (more accurately, their virtual currency credentials), transfer virtual currency to a third party at their customers’ direction, or exchange virtual currency for legal tender or for another virtual currency operate in a largely unregulated environment, which subjects virtual currency businesses and their customers to significantly greater risk than is present in the more regulated banking, commodities, and securities environments. With no real prospect of federal regulation, states have begun to act in a non-uniform way that increases compliance costs and discourages innovation and new business entry. Our goal is to chart a course that most, if not all, states will follow that addresses systemic risk with coherent and consistent prudential regulation and user protection that does not impose an undue burden on businesses who choose to play by the rules and does not drive legitimate business onto the “Dark Web.” It’s quite a challenge.

What more traditional scholarly projects do you have in the works?

I am contributing a chapter on monetary damages for breach of contract from the U.S. perspective to a research handbook on comparative private law remedies for Edward Elgar. I am one of only three U.S.-based authors contributing to the book. I am comprehensively revising and updating Secured Transactions in a Nutshell and Sales & Leases in a Nutshell for West Academic, my work on which is laying the foundation for additional writing in those areas. I am the newest co-author of the most widely-adopted Contracts casebook: Knapp, Crystal & Prince’s Problems in Contract Law: Cases and Materials. I comprehensively revised and updated the casebook supplement in 2017 and my co-authors and I are undertaking a new (9th) edition of the casebook for publication by Wolters Kluwer in early 2019. Finally, I have begun preparing a new edition of the highly-regarded single-volume Farnsworth on Contracts treatise for publication by Wolters Kluwer in 2020.

How do your teaching, scholarship, and service inform one another?

This is my twentieth year as a full-time law professor and my seventeenth at Boyd. I have always tried to write about topics that may interest, and to write in a way that is accessible to, law students, attorneys, and judges, as well as other academics. The subject-matter overlap between my teaching and scholarship has allowed me to develop broad and deep expertise that fuels my service to the American Law Institute, the ULC, the American Bar Association, and occasionally the Nevada Legislature. My service and scholarship, in turn, provide insights that directly benefit my students and my readers and enhance the Boyd School of Law’s profile among judges, practitioners, fellow academics, and in some cases legislators and other policymakers from across the country and abroad.