As an undergraduate at Dartmouth, Bill Goddard enjoyed working at the student radio station—an experience that later helped shape his early professional life, though his career ultimately took him far from broadcasting.

After earning an MBA, he worked on Wall Street as an investment banker during the era that inspired Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko. “It was one heck of a ride in those days!” says Goddard.

He and a classmate later acquired and expanded a small regional radio company, turning around struggling stations before selling the business. The sale gave him the freedom and resources to pursue a long-standing interest in law. “Founding and selling that company gave me the money to go back to school, and the freedom to study what I wanted,” he says.

Goddard chose the University of Connecticut School of Law because it had the nation’s leading insurance law program—and because he wanted to study with Professor Tom Baker. “I really loaded up,” Goddard recalls. “I took Insurance Regulation, Liability, Transactions, Taxation—the curriculum at the Insurance Law Center gave me an enormous toolkit.”

Baker, now at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, immediately recognized Goddard’s promise. “I still remember meeting Bill during his first semester at UConn,” Baker says. “Right after he left my office, I called up Hal Horwich and told him, ‘You have to hire this guy for next summer.’” Horwich, then a partner at Hebb & Gitlin, initially resisted— “We don’t hire 1Ls for our summer program”—but Baker persisted, and Horwich relented. They did, and they didn’t regret it.

“It’s like a bankruptcy on Mars.” — Hal Horwich, as quoted by Bill Goddard

After law school, Goddard clerked on the Second Circuit for Judge Jon Newman— “the most amazing experience intellectually,” he says. “It was like drinking the law from a firehose.” He then returned to Hebb & Gitlin (later Bingham Dana & Gould, and eventually Bingham McCutchen), where he became an expert in insurance, reinsurance, and insurance insolvency. His banking background proved invaluable during major insolvency proceedings, especially during the 2008 financial crisis.

Baker kept an eye on his former student’s career. “And as soon as it was decent, we brought him back to UConn to teach,” Baker recalls. Goddard joined as an adjunct professor in 2008, now marking his eighteenth year in that role.

“I drink my own Kool-Aid,” Goddard says. “Insurance is an elaborate legal structure built around betting on fortuitous events—and who doesn’t like betting on fortuitous events?”

For his first decade teaching at UConn Law, he co-taught Insurance Litigation with John Buchanan and Stuart Rosen (now a Connecticut Superior Court judge). In 2016, he was asked to develop and teach a course on Insurance Solvency Regulation. “When it comes to insurance, I’m always happy to rise to the occasion,” he says. The course quickly became a staple and a student favorite.

“Instead of going bankrupt, insurance companies that fail enter into insolvency proceedings. The process is governed by regulations in individual states rather than the federal bankruptcy code,” explains Goddard. “European lawyers just giggle—our system makes no sense to them. It’s like a bankruptcy on Mars,” he adds, quoting his former mentor Hal Horwich.

In the class, students dissect the structure of the U.S. regulatory system and put themselves in the shoes of regulators or legislators, debating how to address complex, real-world case studies. These “yeasty intellectual questions,” as Goddard calls them, raise constitutional and sovereignty issues that make the subject ideal for deep legal analysis.

Regulators, examiners, and representatives from the Federal Reserve are regular visitors. “So many of the rules and practices of insurance insolvency just aren’t written down,” says Goddard. “Talking directly with regulators gives students that subjective feel and a better overall understanding of the enterprise.”

David Axinn, Special Deputy Superintendent at the New York Liquidation Bureau—and now co-instructor of the Insurance Solvency course—is a frequent classroom collaborator. “Bill makes the case that insolvency is the key to understanding insurance regulation,” Axinn says. “He is a lone voice in the insolvency wilderness.”

Former student Alison Weir, now a staff attorney at Greater Hartford Legal Aid, says, “Insurance solvency sounded pretty dry initially, but it’s so much more dynamic than I had imagined.”

Technological change continues to reshape the insurance world. Goddard had planned to teach a course on insurance technology outside of UConn Law, but when that did not go forward, the Law School then greenlit his new offering, InsurTech Start-up Law, now in its second year.

Goddard hopes more students will explore insurance law’s breadth and impact. “UConn Law and the Insurance Law Center have been wonderful places for people like me,” he says. “Whether it leads you to government service, the insurance industry, or private practice, insurance makes for a fulfilling and rewarding career.”