Oliver Ramsdell Goodenough is a Professor of Law at Vermont Law School and the Executive Director of its Center for Legal Innovation. He is also currently Adjunct Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth College’s Thayer School, a Lecturer at the University of Vermont School of Business Administration and Affiliated Faculty at Stanford University’s CodeX Center for Legal Informatics. In recent years he has also served as a visiting Researcher at the Office of Financial Research at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Within the law, he is a specialist in intellectual property, entertainment law, business transactions, business organizations, and finance. He is also a leading interdisciplinary scholar, with pioneering work in law and behavioral biology, law and neuroscience, legal technology, and applications of computation theory to law.
Goodenough has written widely on these subjects, and has been a fellow or a visitor at institutions as diverse as the Cambridge University Department of Zoology, the Neurological Department of the Charité at Humboldt University in Berlin, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and the European Centre for Law, Science and New Technologies at the University of Pavia in Italy. As Chair of the Planning Committee of the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research, he has helped to foster the development of many interdisciplinary fields, including law and biology, law and neuroscience, neuro-economics, institutions and innovation, and computational law.
- Childhood and Education
Oliver Goodenough was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1952. The child of Ruth Gallagher Goodenough and Ward Hunt Goodenough, he grew up in an academic milieu, mostly in the Philadelphia area, with two older sisters and a younger brother. His primary school experience was mostly at the School in Rose Valley, a pioneering independent school inspired by the Dewey model of education. For high school, he attended the Groton School in Groton Massachusetts, where he graduated cum laude in 1971. He spent his seventh grade year (1964-65) in Chuuk, Micronesia, on the island of Romanum, where his parents were undertaking anthropological field work on language, social structure and adoption.
Goodenough attended Harvard College (B.A. magna cum laude, 1975) where he majored in History and Literature, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School (J.D. cum laude, 1978). He was active in music and theater at both of these institutions, singing with the Collegium Musicum and the University Choir at Harvard and with the Choral Society and the Collegium Musicum at the University of Pennsylvania. In musical theater, Goodenough performed with the Hasty Pudding at Harvard and co-founded the University of Pennsylvania Law School Light Opera Company.
- Family and Personal Life
Goodenough is married to Alison Clarkson. She is also a Harvard graduate, and is a member of the Vermont Legislature, representing Plymouth, Reading and Woodstock. She was an active theater producer in New York City before moving to Vermont, and a co-founder of the New York Theater Workshop. They have two children, Ward (born 1989) and William (born 1994).
Goodenough has continued his interest in music as a member of several choirs and choral groups in New York, Vermont and New Hampshire and as a board member (1995 – 2005, 2007 – 2013) and president (2001-2005) of the Oscar Segal Association, a summer training program for singers in Schroon Lake, New York.
- Legal Practice
Upon graduation from law school Goodenough became an associate at the New York office of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen and Hamilton. In 1981, he shifted to the position of associate at the New York firm of Fulop and Hardee, and stayed on with its successor firm of Kay Collyer & Boose, where he became a partner in 1986. Goodenough’s practice at Kay Collyer straddled the fields of entertainment law, intellectual property, and business finance. A client of note during this time was the singer Billy Joel, and Goodenough performed much of the legal work for Joel’s 1987 tour of Russia. Goodenough accompanied the tour in Moscow, and was recruited into the “roady” crew to operate a spotlight when one of the regulars fell ill. Goodenough is credited on Joel’s КОНЦЕРТ (“Concert”) album stemming from that tour, and his other credits include the films Dead Man Walking (1995), Hilary and Jackie (1998), and Beyond the Sea (2004), and the Broadway play Lucky Guy (2013).
In 1990, together with his colleague M. Graham Coleman, Goodenough gave a series of ground-breaking lectures on entertainment law at Dom Kino, home of the Russian Film Maker’s Union, and it was during this time that he began work with co-author Howard Blumenthal on the first edition of their book This Business of Televsion (1991). After leaving full-time practice for academia at the end of 1990, Goodenough remained of counsel to Kay Collyer until it broke up as a firm in 2003.
- Academia
Goodenough became a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1988, where he taught Entertainment Law. This experience re-kindled his interest in pursuing the world of study and speculative thought that is not frequently available in a life of full-time legal practice, and Goodenough left his partnership at Kay Collyer at the end of 1990 to become an academic. With his family, he spent 1991 as a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University, attached to Downing College and the Faculty of Law. He pursued research and writing on the law of privacy and publicity, culminating in a series of articles in European and American journals and the monograph Privacy and Publicity: Society, Doctrine, and the Development of Law (1996). He also began his study of the applications of evolutionary approaches to cultural transmission and development, including their influence on the development of law. This initial work produced the short 1995 letter to Nature, with Richard Dawkins, on “The ‘St Jude’ mind virus” and the longer 1996 article “Mind Viruses: Culture, Evolution and the Puzzle of Altruism,” in Social Science Information.
On returning to the United States at the end of 1991, Goodenough joined the faculty at Vermont Law School, which remains his home institution. In the summer of 1992, Goodenough attended his first meeting with the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research, which has provided a major intellectual forum for helping to develop his interdisciplinary research. In addition to his teaching, he produced further work on his two areas of focus during the 1990s: privacy and publicity law and cultural evolution. In order to pursue his study of evolutionary biology in greater depth, he spent his 1999/2000 sabbatical again at Cambridge as a visiting scholar, this time as a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology. During this time he also expanded his research and writing to include law and neuroscience, producing the ground-breaking 2001 Jurimetrics article “Mapping Cortical Areas Associated with Legal Reasoning and Moral Intuition,” for which he received the Lee Loevinger Jurimetrics Research Award (2000).
During this time he also began a collaboration with the Functional Imaging Laboratory at University College London, where he participated in a pair of fMRI studies on the neural correlates of legal and moral reasoning. This work led to an affiliation as a Visiting Professor in the Neurological Department of the Charité at Humboldt University in Berlin from 2003-2006. There, he participated in the design of studies of moral and legal reasoning, and is a co-author on the paper “Individual differences in moral judgment competence influence neural correlates of socio-normative judgments” (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2008).
His research on law and neuroscience also led to several publications, including a dedicated issue on law and the brain of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences (co-edited with Semir Zeki, 2004; republished in book form, Law and the Brain, OUP, 2006) and the book Law, Mind and Brain (co-edited with Michael Freedman, 2009). He was for some years (2009-2014) first co-director (with Monika Cheney of the Gruter Institute) and then senior director of the Education and Outreach (E&O) program of the MacArthur Foundation initiatives on Law and Neuroscience. The E&O program introduced a wide range of state and federal judges to the role that neuroscience can play in law, and Goodenough himself wrote and spoke widely around the United States and Europe on these topics, and, with Amanda Pustilnik, was a founding co-editor the SSRN e-journal Law and Neuroscience.
Goodenough’s role as a perceived “neurolaw enthusiast” drew some criticism from those with more skepticism or outright disapproval of the approach. Goodenough frequently debated “neuroskeptic” Stephen Morse, Professor of Law and Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, on how broadly neurolaw could be applied. Michael Pardo and Dennis Patterson have been even more critical. In Minds, Brains, and Law: The Conceptual Foundations of Law and Neuroscience (2013), they argued against Goodenough’s approach to law as a study open to scientific understanding.
During these same years, Goodenough worked with the Gruter Institute as a PI on a program, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, to explore the role of moral sentiments in economic decision making. This program, which included the participation of three winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, led to the well-received volume Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy (Zak, ed., 2008).
In 2005 the work on neuroscience led to an initial collaboration with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society on the interaction of technology with the human brain. This interaction led, in turn to a sabbatical fellowship (2007/2008) and then to a continuing role as a faculty fellow and co-director of the Harvard Law Lab project (2008-2014), funded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. This initiative explored the possible applications of technology and process automation to law, with a principle focus on the legal needs of entrepreneurial business. Among its projects were the passage of virtual corporation laws in Vermont and elsewhere and the successful automation of a limited liability operating agreement, with the software adopted by the Secretary of State of Nevada and incorporated into its Silverflume business formation portal.
Goodenough’s Berkman affiliation opened up a new direction in his scholarship, with a growing attention to innovation, technology and computation theory. While his exploration of these topics has been informed by his prior work on evolution and neuroscience, the possibilities of computation as a way of modeling legal processes and reasoning have increasingly occupied his attention and writing. At Vermont Law School (VLS), in 2012 he established the Center for Legal Innovation. There, with VLS collaborators including Jeannette Eicks and Rebeca Purdom, Goodenough has tackled a series of projects on innovation in law and legal education. With Prof. Purdom, Goodenough was founding co-editor of the SSRN e-journal Innovation in Legal Education. His article
The initiatives at the Law Lab and VLS Center for Legal Innovation put Goodenough into touch with officials in the U.S. government working on financial automation, and in 2013 Goodenough became a part-time researcher at the Office of Financial Research at the U.S Department of the Treasury. There he has pursued collaborations with the economist Mark Flood and the lawyer Matthew Reed. Flood and Goodenough are co-authors of the 2014 working paper “Contract as Automaton: The Computational Representation of Financial Agreements,” which demonstrates that a simple financial agreement is a deterministic finite automaton and argues that contracts and law more generally can be seen as a means of natural language computational specification.
Goodenough expanded on this work during a 2015 sabbatical at Stanford’s CodeX Center for legal informatics. His outline of three stages in the impact of technology on law has been widely cited and has been at the heart of several nationally-circulated presentations. In recent years he has also made contributions to innovation theory, citing the role of generativity as a key element for the “ecosystem” for innovation, and to law and neuroscience, arguing with co-author Jennifer Drobac (Professor, Indiana University McKinney School of Law) that the radical view of binding consent adopted in portions of American law is at odds with the ways in which the brain operates to make decisions.
From 2013-2015 Goodenough was a participant in a program of investigation into legal innovation at the European Centre for Law, Science and New Technologies at the University of Pavia in Italy, headed by Professor Amedeo Santosuosso. This initiative, which included significant student involvement, resulted in the volume, The Challenge of Innovation in Law: The Impact of Technology and Science on Legal Studies and Practice, (Amedeo Santosuosso, Oliver R. Goodenough & Marta Tomasi, eds.) published by the Pavia University Press in 2015.
With funding from the Kauffman Foundation, in recent years Goodenough has worked with the Gruter Institute on several projects, including its ongoing study of the “ecosystems of innovation” (with a scholarly volume in preparation). He was also the lead organizer of the first ever “Legithon” which took place in the Vermont State House in November, 2015 with Gruter and Kauffman support. This educational event applied the format of the Startup Weekend to developing policy initiatives. Follow up events are now in the planning stages.
Goodenough has taken a leading role in promoting the legal recognition of “blockchain” technology. His proposal for legislation in Vermont led to an in depth study of the approach within Vermont government that resulted in a report to the Legislature in 2016, and he has spoken on applications of the blockchain to the rule of law in venues including the World Bank. With the Office of Financial Research, he is working on possible white paper on the potential of regulation of blockchain based financial activity.
His teaching in recent years has included VLS courses on Intellectual Property, Nonprofits, Social Enterprise, e-Lawyering, e-Discovery, Property and Corporations. He also teaches Law for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Dartmouth’s Master of Engineering Management program (offered jointly by the Thayer School of Engineering and the Tuck School of Business) and Business Law for Entrepreneurs in the Masters program at the Grossman School of Business at the University of Vermont.
Goodenough is a frequent contributor of “op-ed” pieces to regional and national publications, including the Huffington Post. In February, 2016, Senator Patrick Leahy read the text of Goodenough’s article for the Rutland Herald, “Court battle — another shutdown,” into the Congressional Record as part of his floor speech on the topic. In the commercial world, Goodenough has been a member of the LexisNexis Law School Publishing Advisory Board, and he has assisted American Legal Media with events at the LegalTech and cyberSecure conferences. With his VLS colleague Jeannette Eicks, he has applied for a patent on software architecture for expressing contractual obligations. The application is pending.
His involvement in administration at VLS has included serving as Chair of the Tenure and Retention and Curriculum Committees, Director of Scholarship and Faculty Representative to the Board of Trustees, and membership on two Dean Search and two Strategic Planning Committees.
Looking forward, Professor Goodenough anticipates further teaching, research and writing on law and computation, legal technology, law and entrepreneurship, neurolaw, and legal education. With law poised to change significantly under the influence of many of the topics that he has helped to pioneer, Goodenough believes that this is an exciting time for legal scholarship and education, and he hopes to be involved for years to come in bringing these changes to a positive fruition.
May, 2016
Oliver Goodenough 