Peter Pitegoff

Peter Pitegoff is Professor Emeritus and former Dean at the University of Maine School of Law. He has worked and written extensively in the areas of community economic development, corporate organization and governance, nonprofit organizations, employee ownership, welfare and labor policy, and urban revitalization. His current research focuses on affordable housing policy, community development finance, and economic justice.

From 2005 to 2015, Professor Pitegoff was Dean of the University of Maine School of Law. 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 the Law School on a national and global stage. He helped to strengthen Maine Law’s position within the University of Maine System and to launch Maine Law’s effort to relocate to downtown Portland. Pitegoff served for ten years (2006-2016) on the board of directors of Coastal Enterprises, Inc., a national leader in community development finance, and was a frequent panelist at conferences and workshops. 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 and Admissions to the Bar, the Gignoux Inn of Court in Portland, and Maine’s Justice Action Group.

Following his decade as Dean, he remained at Maine Law as a full-time professor until Fall 2023, when he earned emeritus status. He taught law school courses in business associations, economic development, nonprofit organizations, professional responsibility and ethics, and employee benefits law. He oversaw the Economic Justice Fellowship program at Maine Law, which provides support and fieldwork stipends to law students with a demonstrated interest in and commitment to public interest law.

As Professor Emeritus, Pitegoff maintains close ties with Maine Law. He also serves on the executive committee of the Community Economic Development Section of the Association of American Law Schools. He is on the board of directors and executive committee of Avesta Housing, a Portland-based nonprofit corporation that develops, manages, and advocates for affordable housing in Maine and New Hampshire. He serves on the board of directors of the Surf Point Foundation, an arts and artist residency organization located in York, Maine. He is on the advisory boards of Maine Law’s Certificate Program in Compliance and of 3i Supportive Housing, a project in affordable housing for adults with physical disabilities.

Professor Pitegoff joined Maine Law in 2005 after 17 years as a law professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. At SUNY, he served as vice dean for academic affairs and founded a clinical program in community economic development law in 1988, which has been a model for transactional clinics at numerous law schools. He helped coordinate an organized bar initiative to revise the New York State Not-for-Profit Corporation Law and served on the New York State Chief Judge’s Judicial Institute on Professionalism in the Law. He previously was general counsel for the ICA Group, a Boston firm that assists community economic development initiatives and worker-owned enterprises nationwide. While in law practice, he taught as an adjunct at Harvard Law School and New York University School of Law. Prior to his career in law, he was a community organizer in eastern North Carolina and in Oakland, California.

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.