Professor Emeritus Charles J. Goetz, a pioneering economist at the University of Virginia School of Law who reshaped the field of contracts, died Oct. 16. He was 85.

Goetz earned his Ph.D. in economics at UVA in 1965 while studying under future Nobel Prize winners Ronald Coase and James M. Buchanan. He served as a professor at the University of Illinois and Virginia Tech before joining UVA Law as its first full-time non-lawyer faculty member in 1975. At the time, only the law schools at Yale and the University of Chicago featured an economist on their faculty.

Goetz, partnering with then-UVA Law professor and eventual Dean Robert E. Scott, wrote seminal works that changed scholars’ understanding of contracts.

“Charlie was unique among the group of economists who joined the leading American law schools in the 1970s,” said Scott, now the Alfred McCormack Professor Emeritus of Law at Columbia Law School. “He intuitively understood the questions that lawyers, unlike economists, were interested in pursuing. He was able to translate economic intuitions into legal doctrine because he understood the legal system and its complexity didn’t translate perfectly into economic precepts. Rather, economic principles could illuminate the underlying logic of legal rules, especially in areas like contracts where the rules were mediated by economic forces.”

Goetz and Bob Scott
Goetz and Robert E. Scott attend a Festschrift honoring their work in contracts law in 2002. UVA Law Archives/Law School Foundation

In a 2006 interview marking his retirement, Goetz said that when he first joined the UVA Law faculty there was some apprehension among his new colleagues about an economist joining their ranks: “I think that probably there was a segment of the faculty that thought this was letting the devil in by the back door.”

At the time, applying economics to law was pioneered by more conservative academics, just as Keynesian economics was pioneered by left-leaning academics in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Eventually, Goetz said in the interview, “People began to see it was just a tool of legal reasoning. It didn’t really have any ideological tinge to it.”

By the end of his career, economic concepts had become embedded across many fields of law.

Born in Brooklyn in 1939, Goetz was a champion cross-country and distance track runner at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School. He earned his bachelor’s degree at Providence College, where he served as editor-in-chief of the school’s newspaper.

In 1964-65, Goetz was a NATO postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pavia, Italy. At Virginia Tech, he oversaw the school’s graduate economics program and seemed destined to lead the department, Goetz said, when he was lured away by UVA.

“[He] was determined to learn enough law so that he would not be an economist on a law faculty, but a law professor who happened to be an economist,” Professor Paul G. Mahoney wrote in a Virginia Journal Festschrift article celebrating Goetz and Scott’s collaboration.

In 1984, Goetz became the first person to write a casebook on law and economics. He also co-authored a casebook on antitrust law with his former economics student Fred McChesney, then a law professor at Northwestern University.

In addition to those subjects, Goetz taught Modern Methods of Proof, which drew on his experience as a consultant to litigators and expert witness. In that role, he advised on everything from the $7 billion International Uranium Cartel litigation case in 1980 to a local pro bono case of a lawsuit involving vermiculite mining in Louisa County, Virginia.

The course taught students how to use tools that were new at the time — computers, video, simulations and statistical analysis — to showcase evidence for juries.

He put those same technical skills to use for the Law School, writing code for the Career Services and Student Records offices in the 1980s to help schedule on-Grounds interviews around classes — at the time, they coincided during the school year.

Goetz’s most influential work often came through his partnership with Scott.

As Goetz recalled in 2006, he heard Scott arguing with another professor that liquidated damages clauses have a purpose.

“I remember at one point jumping up and saying, ‘Bob Scott’s right, and what’s more, I can prove it.’”

The resulting article, “Liquidated Damages, Penalties and the Just Compensation Principle: Some Notes on an Enforcement Model and a Theory of Efficient Breach,” was published by the Columbia Law Review in 1977.

Charles Goetz
Goetz teaches a class in October 1981. UVA Law Archives/Law School Foundation

As Mahoney wrote in the Virginia Journal, “The article not only considerably enhanced the sophistication of the debate over liquidated damages, but employed a heuristic device that scholars draw on frequently. This was the ingenious idea that a contract might have an embedded, although nonobvious, insurance provision. Subsequent scholars would find embedded options and other financial instruments in seemingly mundane contractual provisions.”

Mahoney said you could measure the partnering scholars’ success over the course of many articles by how obvious their points seem today.

“[T]hey were far from obvious in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the articles were written. Indeed, at that time many of Goetz and Scott’s analyses seemed quite radical,” Mahoney wrote. “But today they have become, quite literally, part of the vocabulary of contract law scholarship.”

Scott added that Goetz “was a gentle and gracious soul.”

“He was unfailingly generous in crediting me with ideas that really came from him,” he said. “As he said at a Festschrift that [now Stanford Law School Dean] George Triantis organized in 2002 at UVA, our partnership was ‘optimal.’ I will miss him dearly.”

Professor George Cohen, who joined the UVA Law faculty in 1993, called Goetz’s work with Scott “pathbreaking.”

“[It] greatly affected and continues to influence the way I think, teach and write about contracts,” Cohen said. “His casebooks on law and economics and antitrust were both highly innovative. Charlie was a great colleague, with a razor-sharp intellect combined with humility, a great sense of humor and a positive outlook. He was one of the many people who helped make UVA Law School a special place when I arrived here over 30 years ago.”

Goetz served on the board of editors for the Review of Constitutional Political Economy and as a reviewer for various professional journals. He also taught economics courses to judges through the Law School’s former LL.M. program for judges, and in programs for the federal judiciary under the auspices of the Federal Judicial Center and of the George Mason University Law and Economics Center.

Students appreciated Goetz’s ability to open up new ways of looking at the law.

Ilonka Aylward ’01, a family law attorney who took several classes with the economist, compared the experience to finally seeing the hidden picture in a Magic Eye image.

“Once you go through Professor Goetz’s classes, the world seems less like a senseless collection of unrelated dots, and more like a puppy,” she said in 2006. “For students contemplating legal careers, his training gives the ability to make sense of the law. In that sense, it does not matter what class he happens to teach — you can take antitrust from him and acquire tools indispensable for the practice of family law."

Burton Spivak ’87, counsel with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, said in the article about Goetz’s retirement that his first-year Contracts class with the professor “was a case study in how to read and apply the law with intelligence, creativity and imagination to the facts that you were dealt. It was a fabulous first-year learning experience.”

While energetic in his role as a scholar and teacher, Goetz also packed much into his life outside of work. In addition to being married for 56 years to his wife, Judy, until her death in 2018, he was an avid traveler and runner, and completed the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C., and the Boston Marathon. Also a race officiator, he served as head of officials for the NCAA cross-country championship in 1987. The couple had three sons together, including Chuck Goetz ’88.

Goetz retired as the Joseph M. Hartfield Professor of Law Emeritus and most recently lived in Baltimore, where he spent time with his partner of five years, Nancy Hulse. His family is planning a memorial service for February. 

Founded in 1819, the University of Virginia School of Law is the second-oldest continuously operating law school in the nation. Consistently ranked among the top law schools, Virginia is a world-renowned training ground for distinguished lawyers and public servants, instilling in them a commitment to leadership, integrity and community service.

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