Before retiring in 2012, Michael Dooley taught corporations, corporate financial transactions, mergers and acquisitions, and contracts. He also served as chair of the Graduate Program Committee at the Law School. At the University of Iowa Law School, Dooley was comment editor for the Iowa Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif. After graduation, he practiced law in New York City with Dewey Ballantine Bushby Palmer & Wood. He left practice in 1968 to teach at the University of Illinois. Dooley served on the legal advisory committee of the New York Stock Exchange from 1991-95. He is a member of the American Bar Association's committees on corporate laws and corporate practice, and has served on the Virginia Bar Association Corporate Code Task Force, the ABA Task Force on Executive Compensation, and an ad hoc committee on the American Law Institute Corporate Governance Project. Dooley was chair of the business law section of the American Association of Law Schools. He drafted a new derivative suit statute for the Virginia Stock Corporation Act, which took effect in July 1992. He has been a reporter for the ABA's Model Business Corporation Act since 1996. In 1986 Dooley taught economic foundations of American corporate law at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies in Austria. He has lectured to the Virginia Bar Association, the business law section of the Georgia and Louisiana Bar Associations, the Darden School Executive Program on mergers and acquisitions, the Third Circuit Judicial Conference, and has twice been a principal speaker at the ABA National Institute panel on dynamics of corporate control in New York. In 1996 he was named the Ruby R. Vale Distinguished Academic by the Widener University School of Law.