Professor James A. Wooten named Law Library Director

Law School Professor James A. Wooten has been appointed director of the Charles B. Sears Law Library and vice dean for legal information services, effective Aug. 14. Wooten will be responsible for the overall management and direction of the Law Library. His appointment was made by SUNY Distinguished Professor and UB Law Dean Makau Mutua.

"Jim has a great passion for books and research," said Mutua. "He is in tune with the changing nature of law libraries in the information age and the importance of the law library to our school and the greater Buffalo legal community. Jim is a collegial member of the Law School community, and I feel very fortunate to have him leading our library and on my leadership team."

Wooten teaches courses at UB on pension and employee benefit law, federal income taxation and federal tax policy. He has also taught bankruptcy, legislative policymaking, and law and economics. Wooten's research focuses on regulatory and tax policies that affect retirement plans, health plans and other employee benefit plans. He serves on the steering committee of the Tobin Project and chairs its working group on retirement security. Wooten is also a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and a fellow of the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

"For the last decade, my research has focused on federal policymaking in the fields of employee benefit law and taxation," Wooten said. "The major puzzle was to understand why Congress would pass legislation that was opposed by business and most of organized labor. The answer is in my book, The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974: A Political History, which appeared in January 2005.

"More recently, I have analyzed the origins of the financial problems at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. My research on ERISA has given me a fascination with legislative policymaking. Over the next year, I plan to begin work on a book on the politics of policymaking in the U. S. Congress."

Wooten grew up in a small steel town in northeast Texas. After graduating from Rice University in 1981, he moved to the University of Chicago, where he spent two years pursuing graduate studies in the Department of Anthropology. In 1985, Wooten entered a J.D. /Ph.D. program at Yale University. After completing his law degree in 1989, Wooten clerked for Federal District Judge William Wayne Justice of the Eastern District of Texas.

In 1992-93, Wooten was an associate at Bredhoff & Kaiser, one of the nation's leading firms in the fields of labor and employee benefit law. Wooten later served as Legal History Fellow at Yale Law School and as a Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University School of Law before joining the faculty of UB Law School in 1995. Wooten received his Ph. D. in American studies from Yale University in 2003.