Find additional contact information in the Faculty & Staff Directory.
Christopher K. Odinet is a Professor of Law at Texas A&M University School of Law. His work investigates the legal architecture underlying property rights, financial transactions, digital assets, and emerging technologies, focusing on how legacy legal rules interact with modern markets. His award-winning research has appeared in leading law reviews and has been cited by a number of law reform and regulatory bodies, including the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Bank for International Settlements, and he has provided testimony before government bodies such as the House Financial Services Committee, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law. He is co-author of Digital Commercial Law: Private Law in the Age of Tokens, Platforms, and Automation (Oxford University Press 2026) and author of Foreclosed: Mortgage Servicing and the Hidden Architecture of Homeownership in America (Cambridge University Press 2019). He is also a co-author on leading casebooks in property law, real estate finance, and secured transactions.
Professor Odinet also holds secondary appointments as an Affiliate Professor of Finance in the Mays Business School and as a Mosbacher Research Fellow with the Mosbacher Institute for Trade, Economics, and Public Policy at the Bush School of Government and Public Service. Professor Odinet also maintains an active international research profile. He has been a MacCormick Visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh Law School and regularly serves as a senior research fellow and visiting professor at both Sciences Po and the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
He is actively involved in domestic and international law reform. He has served as a two-time commissioner with the Uniform Law Commission and currently serves as co-reporter for ULC committees studying commercial law in voluntary carbon credit markets and installment land contracts. He previously served as reporter for a committee examining the use of tokens in real estate transactions and as associate reporter for a committee drafting default rules for tenancy-in-common property. He is an advisor to the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law (Fourth) of Property, and a fellow of the European Law Institute. Internationally, he has served as a U.S.-appointed expert to the Hague Conference on Private International Law on projects involving digital tokens and central bank digital currencies.
Professor Odinet is a fellow of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers, the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers, and the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers. He has held leadership positions within the American Bar Association and the Association of American Law Schools and currently serves as a member of the Joint Editorial Board on Uniform Real Property Acts. He is also co-editor of the Annual Survey of Consumer Financial Services Law, published in the ABA’s The Business Lawyer.
As a recognized expert in commercial law, financial regulation, and digital assets, Professor Odinet has been quoted in The Washington Post, TIME, The Economist, Bloomberg Law, Wired, NPR Marketplace, NPR Planet Money, and American Banker, among other outlets.
Prior to joining the Texas A&M faculty in 2024, Professor Odinet was the Josephine R. Witte Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law. He previously served on the faculties of the University of Oklahoma College of Law and the Southern University Law Center. Before entering academia, he practiced in the business and finance group at Phelps Dunbar LLP. He earned his J.D. and Graduate Diploma in Civil Law, magna cum laude, from LSU's Paul M. Hebert Law Center, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Louisiana Law Review, a member of the Order of the Coif, and a recipient of the W. Lee Hargrave Award.