Sad News: Consumer Law Professor John “Andy” Spanogle Dies

by Jeff Sovern

Obituary here. Andy was one of the original co-authors of our casebook and I met him when I worked on the third edition of the book. Andy was larger than life, so filled with bonhomie that you almost didn't realize how brilliant he was. One way Andy will live on is through his influence on consumer law. For example, for the third edition of the casebook, he came up with a single extended story for the introduction that raised questions about every consumer law topic explored in the book. The story makes the subject come more alive for students, helps them understand the variety of consumer law issues that can arise, and pulls them into the course. Law students will continue to learn consumer law using the clever problems he devised, as well as through the techniques for writing the casebook that he taught Dee Pridgen and me that we employed when producing more recent editions. It is not by happenstance that the Washington D.C. office of the National Consumer Law Center is named for him. Andy had been less involved with consumer law in recent years, and so younger consumer law scholars may know little of him, but he was a giant.

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