Professor Tony Luppino teaches or co-teaches business, entrepreneurship, and tax courses, including several interdisciplinary entrepreneurship courses relating to for-profit, social and civic entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial practice of law. He also serves as the Law School’s Director of Entrepreneurship Programs and a Senior Fellow with UMKC’s cross-campus Regnier Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation. In 2017, he was named the inaugural recipient of the UM System Entrepreneurship Educator of the Year Award; in 2018 received the UM System President’s (Faculty) Award for Economic Development; and in 2019 received the UMKC Trustees’ Leo E. Morton Community Service Award.
Prof. Luppino’s scholarship and conference presentations focus primarily on legal and policy issues significantly affecting entrepreneurs, and on entrepreneurship education. He was the principal organizer of the Law & Entrepreneurship Special Interest Group of the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE), and has served for several years as lead editor of the Entrepreneurship Law (EshipLaw) website (http://www.EshipLaw.org) powered by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. As outgrowths of his work in urban innovation and civic entrepreneurship through the interdisciplinary Law, Technology & Public Policy course, he has become one of UMKC’s principal contacts with the MetroLab Network, and a founder and leader of the Legal Technology Laboratory (see http://www.thelegaltechlab.com).
Before joining the faculty on a full-time basis in 2001, Prof. Luppino practiced law with firms in Boston and in the Kansas City region. His practice included a wide variety of business, tax planning, and transactional work, involving multiple disciplines within the law. He received his A.B. from Dartmouth College in 1979. In 1982, he received his J.D. from Stanford Law School where he served as an associate editor of the Stanford Law Review. While in private practice in Boston early in his practice career, he earned his LL.M. degree in Taxation from Boston University, and in 1986 was articles editor of the Boston University Journal of Tax Law.
