Donna Scaffidi teaches at the University of Michigan Law School, where she co-teaches the Zell Entrepreneurship Clinic. Her research looks at how law sorts economic activity into categories, and what happens when those categories change. She studies how securities law decides what counts as an investment and when that status ends, why disclosure rules written for ordinary investors are mostly read by professionals, and how new technologies, from payment networks to artificial intelligence, reshape the institutions that move capital. Before teaching, she practiced corporate and securities law in São Paulo, Palo Alto, and New York, and served as counsel at two public companies.