He earned a JD from Yale, a PhD in Economics and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor's and Master's degree in statistics from Brigham Young University. Before teaching business law at Truman, he clerked on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals and represented Global 500 companies in private practice. His research focuses on the procedural aspects of mass litigation, and on the economic history of education in the United States. He has published in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from Bayesian air pollution modeling, to trade pieces on class action defense, to law review articles on consumer financial protection and the history of corporate social responsibility.