KCON XV Lifetime Achievement Award

The Lifetime Achievement Award for 2020 is bestowed on John Andrew Spanogle, Jr., William Wallace Kirkpatrick Research Professor Emeritus of Law at George Washington University School of Law. A graduate of Princeton University and University of Chicago Law School, Professor Spanogle has been a member of the GW Law Faculty since 1988, and he has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Vanderbilt University, the University of Texas, the University of Maine, SUNY at Buffalo, and Bond and Monash Universities in Australia.

John Andrew Spanogle, Jr.He has spent a lifetime working and writing in the commercial and consumer law field. A founding member of Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Group, he is co-author of the widely used casebook Consumer Law. In addition, Professor Spanogle is the co-author of International Business Transactions, the most widely-used casebook in its field, and a West Group hornbook on the same subject. He also drafted three Titles of Maine’s state statutes – the beloved trifecta of banking, commercial, and consumer law. From 1982 to 1989, he was a member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law and was the chief of delegation to its Working Group on Payment Systems. Professor Spanogle’s research on the commercial law of other nations has resulted in books and articles on many subjects in the field, ranging from Egyptian agricultural law to Chinese commercial dispute resolution.

In 1991-92 he received a Fulbright Grant to be an adviser to the Polish Minister of Finance, which has led to his serving as a consultant to numerous international organizations on proposed commercial financing legislation, including the Polish Registered Pledge Act of 1996, a draft of a Commercial Code for Eritrea, and consumer laws for Trinidad and Tobago. From his early work on the Uniform Commercial Code, through his globe-spanning work on a wide range of commercial law issues, Professor Spanogle embodies the values and aspirations of the International Conference on Contracts.