He attended Valparaiso University on a baseball athletic scholarship and received his bachelor's degree with a double major in English and Philosophy in 1978, then a J.D.

That same year he was admitted to the Illinois bar and moved to Chicago, pursuing a full-time career as a real estate analyst that had previously begun in college.

It won the 2007 Award for Scholarly Excellence presented by the Shakespeare Authorship Studies Conference of Concordia University-Portland, and earned praise in Washington State University's Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature.

De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon (2006) Ulysses S. Grant, 1861-1864: His Rise from Obscurity to Military Greatness (2007) Perpetua of Carthage: Portrait of a Third-Century Martyr (2008) Chrétien de Troyes and the Dawn of Arthurian Romance (2010) Eliot Asinof and the Truth of the Game: A Critical Study of the Baseball Writings (2011) The German Cabaret Legacy in American Popular Music (2013) Man Writes Dog: Canine Themes in Literature, Law and Folklore (2014) The Afterlife of Adam Smith: The Influence, Interpretation and Misinterpretation of His Economic Philosophy (2015) Saint James the Greater in History, Art and Culture (2018) Italian Crime Fiction in the Era of the Anti-Mafia Movement (2020) Screening Charles Dickens: A Survey of the Film and Television Adaptations (2022 scheduled) "Patient readers will hopefully have as much fun perusing this survey as I had assembling it.

Since Smith is rarely read by anyone nowadays, and wrote during an epoch so completely different from our own, specific interpretations of his text and attempts at direct application of his ideas to contemporary problems often become a freewheeling, unaccountable business."