Ralph Mabey is a former veteran bankruptcy judge, a legal scholar and practitioner, teacher, and new faculty member at the S.J. Quinney College of Law. He’s also a veteran runner who has completed more than two-dozen marathons. Physical fitness notwithstanding, he originally started running as a way of clearing his mind and approaching legal problems from a fresh perspective. Recently, though, he had a revelation of sorts, realizing that he had been wrong all those years; he started running not to solve problems, but to clear the neuron paths and, in his words, “shift into neutral.” “I realized it’s an opportunity to not think about law at all, but just let random insights bubble up,” he says. “Learning comes from unexpected sources.”
Given his busy schedule, Mabey’s morning runs may be his only respite from legal pursuits. This fall, he is teaching a bankruptcy survey course, which touches on state collection remedies and introduces students to consumer and business bankruptcy law.