M. W. Gordon

M.W.Gordon (1935-)taught law for four decades based at the University of Florida but with visiting terms as the Centennial Professor in Law at the London School of Economics, Distinguished Fulbright Professor of International Law at Universidade Catolica Portuguesa, Stone Professor at the University of Alabama and Lobinger Professor at George Washington University. He was also a visiting professor at Konstanz, Frankfurt, King's College (London), Francisco Marroquin (Guatemala), Escuela Libre de Derecho (Mexico), and Duke. He authored or co-authored more than seventy books and dozens of chapters and articles. He was a Scholar-in-Residence at the Bellagio Center in Italy. He traveled widely lecturing for the State Department and Council of Foreign Relations. He consulted on numerous high-profile international law cases involving some thirty nations, and sat as a panelist (judge/arbitrator) on NAFTA dispute resolution panels.

Changing focus in 2007, he relinquished teaching to the next generation, built a wooden drift-boat named Osprey, and became a fly fishing guide. He divides his time between the salt-marsh flats below St. Augustine, Florida, and the creeks and rivers of Wyoming and Montana. He has floated Osprey on numerous rivers, including in 2011 rescuing a family of six after their overloaded drift boat crashed into trees and sank on the Snake River in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He has worked with Project Healing Waters in Montana, teaching fly casting to and taking combat-wounded disabled-vets fly fishing on the Yellowstone River. His author-wife Buff and he live in Summer Haven, south of St. Augustine, with their sheltie, Macduff.

His roots in fly fishing reach back to the mid-1940s, when he fished and tied flies (for sale in a local sporting goods store)growing up in West Hartford, Connecticut. He has practiced catch and release ever since catching his first brook trout, and now adds the use of barbless hooks.