About

Ronald Mann is the Albert E. Cinelli Enterprise Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the co-director of the Charles Evans Gerber Transactional Studies Center. He is a nationally recognized scholar specializing in commercial finance, bankruptcy law, secured credit, payment systems, intellectual property, and transactional bankruptcy. Mann has authored groundbreaking casebooks on commercial finance, payment systems, and economic commerce, contributing significantly to the academic and practical understanding of these areas. His professional experience spans both the public and private sectors. Mann clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit and on the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. He practiced real estate and commercial law at Dow, Cogburn & Friedman in Houston and served as an assistant to the U.S. solicitor general, where he specialized in appellate litigation. Before joining Columbia Law School in 2007, Mann held tenured professorships at the University of Michigan, the University of Texas, and Washington University School of Law. Outside academia, he is a member of the American Law Institute and a conferee of the National Bankruptcy Conference. He is also a frequent visiting scholar at Federal Reserve banks and a regular commentator on intellectual property and banking law for SCOTUSblog.

Research topics

• Biology
• Computational biology
• Computer Science
• Genetics
• Chemistry
• Zoology
• Anatomy
• Biological system
• Evolutionary biology
• Neuroscience
• Biochemistry

Selected publications

• Explaining the Pattern of Secured Credit

  2022-03-21

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Granting collateral to secure loans is a dominant feature of this country's commerce: domestic lenders currently hold about two trillion dollars in secured debt. This chapter relies on a combination of existing statistical studies and relatively unstructured interviews. The most obvious advantage to the lender of issuing secured credit is that receiving collateral increases the likelihood that the lender will be able to collect the loan forcibly if the borrower does not voluntarily repay it. The most obvious way in which lenders try to solve incentive problems is by including provisions in the loan documents that allow the lender to monitor and oversee the borrower's activities. Finally, the swirling policy debates about the propriety of secured credit make an understanding of the reasons why commercial borrowers use collateral particularly important.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Prediction of protein–ligand binding affinity from sequencing data with interpretable machine learning

  Nature Biotechnology · 2022 · 133 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Computational biology
  • Computer Science

  -seq, it determines the absolute affinity of protein-ligand interactions. We also apply ProBound to profile the kinetics of kinase-substrate interactions. ProBound opens new avenues for decoding biological networks and rationally engineering protein-ligand interactions.

  PublisherDOI

• Assessing the Influence of Amici on Supreme Court Decision Making

  Journal of Empirical Legal Studies · 2021-10-29 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The authors analyze a dataset of indicators of the influence of amicus filings on the decisions of the United States Supreme Court from October Term 2013 through October Term 2018), examining the effect of filings on the prevailing party, on citations to amicus filings, and on sources drawn from amicus filings. The dataset includes 386 cases, 4500 amicus filings, and 22,000 citations in Supreme Court decisions. In some ways, the paper updates scholarship from the turn of the century, when amicus filings were much less prevalent, but it also breaks new ground with the data about citations to amicus filings and sources drawn from amicus filings. The principal findings are (1) the effect of amicus filings on the decision is much more even than it was at the turn of the century, when it was concentrated on bottom‐side filings; and (2) the effects of filings are much more noticeable for amicus filers less directly motivated by monetary considerations (academics, think tanks, and the like) and less noticeable for those more directly motivated by monetary considerations (trade associations and businesses).

  PublisherDOI

• Reliable Perfection of Security Interests in Crypto-Currency

  SMU Scholar (Southern Methodist University) · 2020-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  As you all know, the organizers of this event chose a topic of burning interest when they selected crypto-currency as the focus of this year’s panel. Fortunately, unlike most of the similar events at which the author has been asked to speak, we have not been asked to talk about Bitcoin as the currency of the future; my doubts about the ability of Bitcoin to succeed as a currency of routine use – as opposed to a speculative investment vehicle – dampen my interest in talking repeatedly about that subject. The task they have set for the speakers is one that involves a transactional development with much more potential for widespread deployment: transactions in which lenders extend loans in return for an interest in some form of crypto-currency as collateral.\nThat topic sidesteps the indeterminate speculation about the future development of Bitcoin in favor of something of commercial immediacy. Crypto-currencies, in fact, have present value on the balance sheets of commercial borrowers, and all signs suggest that, in the years to come, investments in one or another form of crypto-currency will become more routine and more substantial. To be sure, that value might be volatile, and it might or might not be useful to think of it as currency, but from the perspective of lenders, it represents value that would enhance the borrowing base of their customers if lenders could capture it reliably.\nThis article considers that topic. The author proceeds in three steps. First, the author considers the simple straightforward approach of perfecting a security interest under existing legal rules. Recognizing the obvious weaknesses of that approach in cabining transfers of collateral to pseudonymous purchasers, the author turns in the second part of the article to a more capacious use of institutional arrangements that should give the lender a more effective control of the asset – transactions using what the author calls “quasi-control.” Finally, the third part of the article briefly considers technological advances that would use blockchain-based smart contracting tools to perfect the lender’s interests more elegantly, namely the development of a “smart” lien that integrates the respective rights of the borrower and lender directly into the mechanism of the blockchain.

  Publisher

• Dense and pleiotropic regulatory information in a developmental enhancer

  Nature · 2020 · 100 citations

  • Biology
  • Genetics
  • Computational biology
  DOI

• A Systematic Nomenclature for the Drosophila Ventral Nerve Cord

  Neuron · 2020 · 105 citations

  • Neuroscience
  • Biology
  • Anatomy
  DOI

• Patent Exhaustion After Impression Products

  2020-03-24

  book1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Driver for Contactless Payments

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2020-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  As a consumer, my primary experience with cash before the virus was standing in checkout lines observing the sluggish pace of cash transactions in front of me. Like so many things in our lives, the advent of the virus has changed the situation markedly. From the earliest days of infection, it has been far more unsettling to observe cash transactions knowing that the virus persists on paper and metal surfaces for days.\nThe dynamic that has driven the choices merchants offer in face-to-face retail transactions will change as well. Driven by the private exigencies of the retail environment, the last few decades have witnessed private mechanisms spreading cash-less retail transactions, predominantly card-based. In some countries, policymakers have supported that spread, reacting to the societal costs of a heavy reliance on cash by adopting rules that limit or even aim to eliminate the use of cash.More recently in this country, however, as a few businesses have refused to accept cash, local policymakers have pushed back, reasoning that a refusal to accept cash excludes less affluent purchasers (frequently unbanked) from fair access to commerce. Among others, Massachusetts,New Jersey,New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco have banned cashless businesses. Indeed, the present Congress has considered two bills that would extend such a ban to the federal level.The likelihood that Amazon’s cashier-less stores (Amazon Go) would refuse cash payments has been a particular stimulant to those bills.\nThis essay makes two basic points about the effect of the virus on that mix of policy, legal, and institutional arrangements. First, policies fostering the use of cash in retail transactions are much harder to justify in the world of the virus, as it is harder to make those transactions safe for purchasers, cashiers, or the populace in general. Second, the slow pace of the shift from card-based payments from swipe to chip, with the slower drift to phone-based payments, is more worrisome now, where fully contactless payments are safer for all involved than authentication either by swipe or chip.

  Publisher

• Empirical studies in patentability

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2019-08-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter reviews empirical literature studying the patentability requirements. The chapter initially explores scholarship focused on whether a patent’s validity is empirically quantifiable. This literature attempts to discern indicators of patent validity and patent quality. The chapter then examines scholarship on the courts and how they evaluate a patent’s (or patent application’s) validity. These studies examine judicial and administrative outcomes and the content of such decisions reaching these outcomes with the goal of both quantifying a decision-maker’s attitude toward patentability and identifying the specific standards and analysis used in deciding patentability.

  PublisherDOI

• The making of a champion

  2018-01-30

  bookSenior author
  Publisher

Recent grants

• Interpreting and Deploying Genomic Information During Animal Development

  NIH · $6.3M · 2016–2031

• NIH Grant R01HD027986

  NIH · $462k · 1995

• Proximo-Distal Patterning in the Drosophila Appendages

  NIH · $6.0M · 1999–2018

• A Brain Circuit Program for Understanding the Sensorimotor Basis of Behavior

  NIH · $29.2M · 2017–2023

• Integrative Functional Mapping of Sensory-Motor Pathways

  NIH · $3.4M · 2018–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Harmen J. Bussemaker

  Columbia University

  30 shared

• Barry Honig

  Columbia University

  25 shared

• Jonathan Enriquez

  Saint Luke's Hospital

  22 shared

• Judith F. Kribelbauer

  SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics

  20 shared

• Matthew Slattery

  19 shared

• Chaitanya Rastogi

  Columbia University

  19 shared

• Ryan Loker

  Columbia University

  18 shared

• Siqian Feng

  Columbia University

  16 shared

Education

• B.A.

  University of Michigan

• M.A.

  University of Texas

• Ph.D.

  Washington University School of Law

Awards & honors

• American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers (200…