Close Up
Retailing experience informs scholarship
S. Todd Brown joined the UB law faculty last fall after finishing a two-year teaching fellowship at the Beasley School of Law at Temple University. Photo: UB LAW FORUM
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“I can relate to people who are running businesses. I can personalize some of the intellectual concepts and understand what people are thinking when they’re faced with certain situations.”
S. Todd Brown knows business—from some of the biggest companies in America, which he represented in large-scale bankruptcy cases, to one of the smallest, an antiques-and-collectibles store that he ran for a while between high school and college. That experience, he says, has informed his scholarship on bankruptcy and business law, “because I can relate to people who are running businesses. I can personalize some of the intellectual concepts and understand what people are thinking when they’re faced with certain situations.”
Brown joined the UB Law faculty last fall as an associate professor, the latest stop in a peripatetic life journey. His father was in the Navy so the family relocated often. “I saw a lot of different places,” Brown says. “It was tough, but interesting. I got a better feel for how people in different areas think about things.”
The family wound up in Gulfport, Miss., for his high school years, and after his short-term adventure in retailing, he went to Loyola University of New Orleans, where he studied philosophy and graduated summa cum laude.
“I decided in my second year in college that I wanted to teach, but not at the undergraduate level,” Brown says. “The things that interested me most in philosophy were issues that translated well into law. A lot of the issues that have been discussed in philosophy with respect to law have also been coming up in cognitive psychology and the behavioral sciences. There is a lot of overlap in the general conceptual thinking in those fields.”
Brown graduated in 1999 from Columbia University School of Law, where he was articles editor of the Columbia Business Law Review. From there he went to Cleveland, where his wife was in medical school, and worked with the firm Jones Day representing corporate debtors and creditors in Chapter 11 and cross-border bankruptcies. “The issues there were really interesting, cutting-edge issues,” he says. One of them involved counseling Napster executives after a federal judge ruled the company’s file-sharing technology illegal.
He then moved to the firm’s Washington office before joining the D.C. firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. There he developed training programs for other attorneys on bankruptcy law and corporate investigations, and worked on banking issues in such high-profile cases as Enron and Worldcom.
In mid-2007. Brown took a two-year teaching fellowship at the Beasley School of Law at Temple University. In addition to teaching courses, fellows interact with master teachers and hone their classroom skills. “This program was designed for people who have been in practice for a while,” he says, “to help them make the transition, learn about different pedagogical approaches, and think about communicating complex legal concepts for people who have never practiced law.”
In practice and at Temple, his focus increasingly turned to bankruptcy law. “I was drawn to it because of the way the bankruptcy system is set up,” Brown says. “You really have to understand people and the motivations guiding the different participants. It’s never just a one plaintiff, one defendant kind of situation. You have a debtor and a lot of different constituencies. As soon as you think you’ve got everything figured out, something different comes along and makes you rethink everything. These are fun areas to think and write about.”
Brown is married to Natasha Cervantes, a forensic psychiatrist, and they have two daughters, ages 3 and 1. (“I probably spend more of my spare time watching Dora the Explorer than anything else,” he jokes.) At UB Law, he feels a kinship.
“A lot of people are working on things that I can relate to and I can feel comfortable exchanging ideas with,” he says. “And the fact that I would be able to teach the subjects that I am most interested in was a big plus. It is really important to be able to teach something that you’re passionate about.
“I think you can teach black-letter law and practical considerations at the same time. It’s also important to inject ethical considerations into what you teach,” he says.
“I want my students to come out with a firm understanding of the law, of their clients’ interest, and of the obligations and responsibilities that go along with being in such an important position.”
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