Peter Pitegoff

Peter R. Pitegoff (born March 6, 1953) is a law professor and former Dean of the University of Maine School of Law. The focus of his career has been in community-based economic development and legal education.

Contents

• 1. Early life and education

• 2. Early career

• 3. Maine Law Dean

• 4. Teaching and scholarship

• 5. Selected publications

• 6. References

Early life and education

Peter Pitegoff is a 1975 graduate of Brown University and a 1981 graduate of New York University School of Law, where he was a Root-Tilden scholar. He was born in New York City, grew up in Roslyn, New York, and graduated from Roslyn High School in 1971.

Early career

Pitegoff began his career in the mid-1970s as a community organizer in rural North Carolina and in Oakland, California, following his undergraduate concentration in American civilization and teacher certification for secondary school social studies. After earning his J.D. degree, he served from 1981 to 1988 as general counsel for the ICA Group, a Massachusetts consulting firm that assists community economic development initiatives and worker-owned enterprises nationwide. While in law practice, he taught as an adjunct at New York University School of Law and at Harvard Law School. From 1988 to 2005, he was a law professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo School of Law. At SUNY, he served as vice dean for academic affairs and founded a clinical program in community economic development law, which has been a model for transactional clinics at other law schools. He helped coordinate an organized bar initiative to revise the New York Not-for-Profit Corporation Law and served on the New York State Chief Judge’s Judicial Institute on Professionalism in the Law.

Maine Law Dean

From 2005 to 2015, Pitegoff served as Dean of the University of Maine School of Law (“Maine Law”) in Portland, Maine, a position currently held by Leigh Saufley, former Chief Justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. As Dean, he worked with colleagues to expand Maine Law’s pivotal role in law, policy, economic development, and social justice in Maine and to achieve a higher profile for Maine Law on a national and global stage. He served from 2006-2016 on the board of directors of Coastal Enterprises, Inc., a national leader in community development finance. He served as co-chair of Maine’s Juvenile Justice Task Force, and as member of the Merit Selection Committee for the U.S. Magistrate Judge (District of Maine); the Advisory Committee on Legislative Ethics for the Maine House of Representatives; the Clinical Skills Committee of the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education; the Gignoux Inn of Court in Portland; and Maine’s Justice Action Group.

Teaching and scholarship

Pitegoff has taught law school courses in corporation law, professional responsibility and ethics, economic development law, nonprofit organizations, corporate governance, and employee benefits law. He oversees the Economic Justice Fellowship program at Maine Law, which provides support and fieldwork opportunities to students with a demonstrated interest in economic justice and community development. He serves on the Board of Directors of Avesta Housing, a nonprofit developer of affordable housing in Maine and New Hampshire, and on the Board of Trustees of the Surf Point Foundation, an arts and artist residency institution. He is a frequent panelist at a wide range of conferences and workshops. Pitegoff has worked and written extensively in the areas of economic development, corporate organization, nonprofits, employee ownership, welfare and labor policy, urban revitalization, and community development finance.

Selected publications

• Community Development Finance and Economic Justice, Chapter 4 in FROM THE GROUND UP: LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP FOR SCHOLARSHIP FOR THE URBAN CORE (Rashmi Dyal-Chand & Peter D. Enrich, eds.) (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019).

• Community Development Law, Economic Justice, and the Legal Academy, 26 J. AFFORDABLE HOUS. & CMTY. DEV. L. 31 (2017).

• An Evolving Foreclosure Landscape: The Ibanez Case and Beyond, 5 ADVANCE 131 (2011) (co-authored with Laura Underkuffler).

• The Market for Change: Community Economic Development on a Wider Stage, in PROGRESSIVE LAWYERING, GLOBALIZATION, AND MARKETS: RETHINKING IDEOLOGY AND STRATEGY (Clare Dalton, ed. 2007).

• Worker Ownership in Enron’s Wake—Revisiting a Community Development Tactic, 8 J. SMALL & EMERGING BUS. L. 239 (2004).

• Shaping Regional Economies to Sustain Quality Work: The Cooperative Health Care Network, in HARD LABOR: WOMEN AND WORK IN THE POST-WELFARE ERA (Joel Handler & Lucie White, eds., 1999).

• Child Care Policy and the Welfare Reform Act, 6 J. AFFORDABLE HOUSING & COMMUNITY DEV. L. 113 (1997) (co-authored with Lauren Breen).

• Unions, Finance, and Labor’s Capital, chapter 5 in UNIONS AND PUBLIC POLICY: THE NEW ECONOMY, LAW AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICS (Lawrence G. Flood, ed., Greenwood Press 1995).

• Law School Initiatives in Housing and Community Development, 4 B.U. PUB. INT. L.J. 275 (1995).

• Urban Revitalization and Community Finance, 27 U. MICH. J.L. REFORM 613 (1994).

• Child Care Enterprise, Community Development, and Work, 81 GEO. L.J. 1897 (1993).

• The Democratic Corporation: The New Worker Cooperative Statute in Massachusetts, 11 N.Y.U. REV. L. & SOC. CHANGE 441 (1983) (co-authored with David Ellerman).