John Moye, longtime Denver business attorney and DU professor, dies at 77

When John Moye’s father died in Deadwood, S.D., he left behind this concise, 11-word obituary he had written for himself: “Jeff Moye left Deadwood yesterday and is not expected to return.”

When John Moye died May 27 at the age of 77 — after an acclaimed legal career that included a University of Denver professorship, creation of an institute to improve the justice system and 40 years atop the law firm that bears his name — his obituary was a far less pithy 699 words.

“He would want to be remembered as a friend to everybody,” his daughter, Kelly Moye, said in an interview. “It didn’t matter whether you were the owner of a company or the janitor. He wanted to know you and he cared about you and your kids and where you came from.”

As a wiry and energetic young man, Moye studied accounting and business at Notre Dame in the early 1960s, where he was a rock ‘n’ roll disc jockey known as Johnny Mopp. Bored in his first accounting job after college, he moved on to Cornell University, where a business law professor told him that he was helpless. Moye would simply “never understand contracts.”

To spite the professor, he spent a 50-year law career specializing in contracts.

“People really respected him and really paid attention to what he had to say, more so than a lot of other lawyers. A lot of lawyers have their opinions,” his longtime law partner, Ted White, said with a laugh this week, “but they’re not all worth listening to and his are. Or, his were.”

After law school, an ROTC commitment led to a four-year stint at Lowry Air Force Base, bringing Moye to Denver, the city he would call home for the rest of his life.

While a thirtysomething DU professor in the 1970s, he used songs to teach otherwise dry and complex tenets of contract law, as he explained to an interviewer in 2014: “‘Tell Laura I Love Her’ is an offer to make a unilateral contract, for example, but ‘Help Me, Rhonda’ is an inadequate offer because it doesn’t state the context of what you want Rhonda to help you do.”

That culminated in his “Contracts Rap,” which was featured in a New York Times article. To help students memorize contract rules while taking Colorado’s bar exam, Moye worked 60 concepts of contract law into rhyming couplets that served as a mnemonic for thousands of students.

Should you delegate a duty, but the delegate abstains