Keith Rowley

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

I am very actively involved in a number of law reform projects.  Probably the most important are a series of joint projects of the American Law Institute, the Uniform Law Commission, the European Law Institute, and the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) that explore the effects emerging technologies – including ever-more-smartphones and other mobile devices (including wearables), blockchain, cryptocurrencies and other digital assets, and the Internet of Things (interconnected smart devices) – are having on business and consumer behavior and whether and how commercial law should reflect and respond to technologies and technology-driven behavior that change much more rapidly than the law does or can.

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

I am comprehensively revising and updating Secured Transactions in a Nutshell and Sales & Leases in a Nutshell for West Academic, undertaking a new edition of a secured transactions casebook for Wolters Kluwer, and continuing my work on a new edition of the highly-regarded Farnsworth on Contracts treatise for Wolters Kluwer.

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

I have always tried to write and present about topics that may interest, and to do so 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 and through the ALI, the ULC, the American Bar Association, and occasionally the Nevada Legislature and other state legislatures.  My service and scholarship, in turn, provide insights that directly benefit my students and enhance the Boyd School of Law’s profile among judges, practitioners, fellow academics, and legislators and other policymakers from across the country and abroad.

What is it about being a law school professor that inspires you?

First and foremost: my current and former students.  This is my twentieth year at Boyd.  This semester, I am teaching my 1,350th unique Boyd student.  I enjoy getting to know my students and following their professional and personal development during and after law school.  I am so proud to see graduates from this upstart start-up law school, which was still housed in a barely-converted former elementary school when I began teaching here, who have served or are serving on the federal and state benches, in the Nevada Legislature, in other local and statewide elected offices, on the Gaming Commission, Gaming Control Board, and other important regulatory bodies, as federal, state, and local prosecutors and public defenders, as full-time legal aid attorneys or enthusiastic pro bono counsel, as volunteers, supporters, staff, and leaders of non-profits and charitable organizations, as local, state, and national bar leaders, and (yes) as law professors and legal educators.