Charles L. Knapp, Joseph W. Cotchett Distinguished Professor of Law

Professor Chuck Knapp is a graduate of New York University School of Law, JD (1960), University of Sydney, Rotary Foundation Scholar (1957), and Denison University, B.A. (1956). He came to UC Hastings in 1998 from New York University Law School, where he had been a faculty member since 1964, and was the Max E. Greenberg Professor of Contract Law.

At UC Hastings, Professor Knapp was named the first holder of the Joseph W. Cotchett Distinguished Professorship. Besides his years of service at N.Y.U., he has been a visiting professor at Harvard, the University of Arizona, Brooklyn Law School, and the University of Copenhagen.

His principal teaching interest is the first-year Contracts course. Along with UC Hastings' Professor H.G. Prince and Professor Nathan Crystal, he is the co-author of a widely used casebook, Problems in Contract Law, published by Aspen and now in its seventh edition. Professor Knapp’s other teaching is usually in the commercial law area; at UC Hastings he also teaches an advanced Contracts course and a course in Secured Transactions.

Born and raised in Zanesville, Ohio, Professor Knapp has two daughters, a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law, and five grandchildren, with all of whom he tries to spend at least some time each summer at the family home in the Catskill Mountains, in New York State.

Courses Taught: Contracts, Contracts II, and Secured Transactions

Expertise: Contracts and Commercial Law

My favorite part about teaching you is... the fact that the student body is as diverse, as welcoming and as challenging as the city of San Francisco itself. The invitation to come to UC Hastings was a welcome opportunity for me to join a distinguished faculty in the forefront of legal education for the Twenty-first Century.