Peter Pitegoff
Dean and Professor of Law
B.A., Brown University
J.D., New York University
Phone: (207) 780-4344
View Dean Pitegoff's most recent curriculum vitae.
Peter Pitegoff is the sixth Dean of the University of Maine School of Law. He joined Maine Law in July 2005 after seventeen years as a law professor at the University at Buffalo Law School, State University of New York, where he also served for seven years as vice dean for academic affairs. He teaches corporation law, business transactions, labor policy, community development law, nonprofit organization law, and legal ethics. He has worked and written extensively in the areas of economic development, labor and industrial organization, nonprofit corporations, employee ownership and alternative enterprise forms, welfare and employment policy, and urban revitalization.
In Maine, Pitegoff is advancing the Law School through new program development and engagement with diverse institutions. He has positioned the Law School to expand upon its pivotal role in law, policy, and economic development regionally and in Maine and to achieve a higher profile on a global stage. Curricular innovation is bolstering a historically stellar teaching institution, faculty research kindles scholarly exchange and publication, and public service pervades the organizational culture. With a focus on the environment, ocean and coastal issues, social and economic justice, health policy, and more, Pitegoff is working to identify the Law School as a destination point for students, faculty, scholars, lawyers, and policymakers from near and far.
At Buffalo, Pitegoff founded a law school clinical program in community economic development law, which has served as a model for transactional clinics at many other law schools and which continues to thrive today. Dean Pitegoff has been actively engaged in public policy, including an organized bar initiative to draft a major revision of the New York Not-for-Profit Corporation Law and appointment by the Chief Judge of New York State to serve on the Judicial Institute for Professionalism in Law. On behalf of the president of the University at Buffalo, he played a leadership role in charting a strategy for university engagement with the community. In 2006, the presiding officers of the Maine Legislature appointed Dean Pitegoff to the advisory committee on legislative ethics.
Prior to his academic career, Dean Pitegoff was legal counsel for the ICA Group, a Boston firm that assists community economic development initiatives nationwide, and taught on an adjunct basis at Harvard Law School and at New York University School of Law. He 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. His wife, Ann Casady, is an accomplished graphic designer and design professor. They have two sons.
