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News Release

Goodenough Redoubles VLS Focus on Financial, Legal Tech Research in New Position

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

SOUTH ROYALTON, Vt.

Vermont Law School announced today that Professor Oliver Goodenough, a long-serving member of its faculty, recently transitioned to the position of research professor. The move, effective Jan. 1, allows Goodenough to focus on his research agendas in legal and financial technology and in law and neuroscience.

Goodenough is an internationally recognized scholar with a distinguished history of interdisciplinary study and publication. His research and writing at the intersection of law, economics, finance, media, technology, neuroscience and behavioral biology make him an authority in many areas of legal innovation. Goodenough’s interdisciplinary publications include a piece on mind viruses in the science journal Nature, co-authored with Richard Dawkins; an issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B on law and neuroscience, co-edited with Semir Zeki; and a working paper titled “Contract as Automaton: The Computational Representation of Financial Agreements,” co-authored with Mark Flood, for the Office of Financial Research of the United States Department of the Treasury.

Goodenough has been a member of the VLS faculty since 1992. While his new position means a less active role in teaching, his work will bring cutting-edge research initiatives to VLS. His first sponsored project involves research using neuroscience to help understand leadership, focusing both on leaders and their characteristics and on the processes that select and review them. The project is intended to culminate in a book, with the current working title “The Citizen and the Prince: Revisiting Machiavelli in the Age of Neuroscience, Twitter and Trump.” Other research will focus on Goodenough’s expertise in legal technology, with the goal of engaging faculty and students in the emerging discipline of Legal Tech and its application to regulation and finance. 

“I am very pleased to have the opportunity to transition my work at Vermont Law School, giving increased priority to the research agenda of legal innovation,” said Goodenough. “We can build on VLS’s strong record of achievement as a leader in scholarship and teaching in this field.”

VLS President and Dean Thomas McHenry also welcomes the development. 

“Professor Oliver Goodenough has been one of the most productive scholars on our faculty, and we are excited to deploy him even more fully as a leader in setting our research agenda going forward,” McHenry said.

In addition to his work at VLS, Goodenough holds positions as affiliated faculty at Stanford’s CodeX Center, the director of research at the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research, an adjunct professor at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering, and a lecturer at the University of Vermont’s Grossman School of Business. Past affiliations include Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he was a co-director of the Law Lab project, and the Office of Financial Research of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where he was a researcher and visiting fellow.

Outside of academia, Goodenough is a special counsel at Gravel & Shea in Burlington, Vt., where he focuses on blockchain and other financial technology matters. He is also a co-founder and director of Skopos Labs, Inc., an early-stage company specializing in the use of machine learning to develop predictions on the outcome and application of legislative and regulatory initiatives.