The manuscript that has occupied my desk for the better part of two years now has its final title: Business Associations: Law in Theory and Practice. The book is forthcoming from Aspen Press in 2027. The structural work is complete. The cite-check and final production pass remain.

A treatise on Business Associations is a crowded shelf. Mine takes one structural commitment seriously: every device a reader needs to understand the doctrine lives in the book itself. Statutory text appears in verbatim excerpt boxes when it matters, with one state per box. Deal documents pulled from SEC filings appear as primary text, annotated in the margins. Black-letter rule statements are quoted verbatim from the statute or the Restatement. A running hypothetical follows three founders across sixteen chapters as they build, fight, and dissolve a series of ventures. Why-boxes surface the economic logic behind each rule, marked clearly so students who want to skip them can do so without losing the doctrine.

A chapter for DAOs

The book makes one departure from the standard casebook. It treats decentralized autonomous organizations as a chapter-level entity form alongside agency, partnership, LLC, and corporation. The DAO chapter sits at full doctrinal weight, with its own governance failure modes, its own design tradeoffs, and its own statutory landscape from Wyoming, Tennessee, Utah, and the Marshall Islands. It is the longest chapter in the book and the one I am most proud of.

What the manuscript carries

Across sixteen chapters, the manuscript carries nineteen annotated deal-document excerpts (LLC operating agreements, voting trust agreements, indemnification provisions, drag-along clauses, SAFEs, convertible notes), thirty-eight verbatim statutory and Restatement boxes, ten reference tables, and a sustained narrative through-line tracking three founders and the entities they build. The economic argument that motivates the work is preserved in Why-boxes that students can engage or skip. The cases speak for themselves in Voice of the Court sidebars. Debate Boxes mark the doctrinal terrain where scholars actively contest the standard view, so students learn early that some of what the casebook teaches is contingent.

The work that remains

Aspen Press received the manuscript a full year ahead of the contract delivery date. Publisher-requested structural fixes are integrated. Peer review came back positive. The work that remains is finish-carpentry: citation harmonization, the final DOCX conversion, and the cross-references that only become possible once everything has its final form.

A companion website at oranburg.law/BA hosts chapter materials, the new Knight RUP restoration project, and supplementary resources for adopters.