Ronald Mann is a professor of law at Columbia, where he teaches courses in commercial finance, payment systems and deals. He graduated from the University of Texas in 1985, and after clerking on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit (Judge Joseph Sneed) and the Supreme Court (Justice Lewis Powell), he worked in the U.S. solicitor general’s office under Kenneth Starr and Drew Days. He has written extensively about secured credit, credit cards and other electronic payments systems, the role of patents in financing innovation and related topics. For SCOTUSblog, he covers the court’s cases in the areas of commercial law and intellectual property.