Professor Chiappinelli is a nationally recognized expert in corporate law and legal education. He taught Contracts, Business Entities, Mergers & Acquisitions, and Securities Regulation over the course of a long career at five law schools. He also taught Nonprofit Organizations, Corporate Governance, Corporate Finance, and Civil Procedure. Throughout his career he won five teaching awards voted on by students and received the President's Excellence in Teaching Award from Texas Tech. Professor Chiappinelli is the sole author of one of the leading casebooks on business entities, which has been used at over 25 law schools.

For over twenty years, Professor Chiappinelli has been an Elected Member of the American Law Institute, an honor accorded to fewer than 1% of all lawyers in the United States. The ALI comprises practicing lawyers, judges, and law professors, and is the leading independent organization producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and improve the law through such projects as the Restatements of the Law.

In addition to his casebook, Professor Chiappinelli has written over two dozen articles published in the country’s leading law reviews. His scholarship has been cited in dozens of law review articles and treatises, by judges of the most influential business courts in the United States, and by the SEC. He has been frequently quoted in The Wall Street Journal both for his corporate law expertise and as an expert on legal education.

Prior to coming to Texas Tech in 2012, he had been the dean of the School of Law at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He began his academic career at the University of Puget Sound and Seattle University School of Law where he was a professor of law and an associate dean. He was a visiting professor at Willamette University College of Law in Salem, Oregon, and Distinguished Visiting Professor and Fellow of the A.A. Berle Center for Corporations, Law & Society at Seattle University.

Before entering academia Professor Chiappinelli served as a law clerk at the United States District Court in Los Angeles and the Supreme Court of California in San Francisco. He practiced corporate law in Los Angeles with Munger, Tolles, & Olson and with Jones Day. He is a member of the State Bar of California (inactive).