Hey there, I’m Bill Childs.

I’m an in-house litigator and an adjunct law professor. I created a course (called Recreation and Risk) based on a lifetime of interest in amusement park safety and litigation, including nearly a decade as a full-time law professor. Now I’ve written a book for Carolina Academic Press about the same subject. It’s mostly intended for use in law school classes, but other people might like it too. There’s stuff I wanted to include in the book that wouldn’t fit, so that’s why this site exists. I might blog about related subjects, too. While the book is being published by Carolina Academic Press, this website is just mine.

Be sure to look at the bottom of every page where it says, “I assure you this is not legal advice.” It isn’t. I have exactly one client, and you are not it. You should not rely on this as legal advice, because it isn’t, and you should get a lawyer if you need one, but I’m not that lawyer.

In addition to not being legal advice, this website and the book do not necessarily reflect the views of my employers. Any of them.

If you want to know more about me professionally, I suppose you can look on LinkedIn. I’ve clerked for a federal judge, practiced law at two different law firms (Williams & Connolly and Bowman & Brooke), taught full-time for eight years, and, since 2019, been an in-house litigator, first for a major manufacturing conglomerate and now for a healthcare company that spun off from that conglomerate.

I’ve also taught the course this casebook grew out of several times, as an adjunct at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Saint Paul and at Western New England University School of Law in Springfield, Massachusetts (where I was full-time faculty for eight years as well).

That course grew out of a documentary film and book about the infamous Action Park in New Jersey, and you can read or listen more about the class in my interview with Marketplace Morning Report. The casebook is much less about Action Park but I very enthusiastically recommend the book and film that inspired me to create the course.

I’ve ridden around 200 roller coasters. I still ride them. Here’s a photo from the summer of 2023, riding the truly bonkers Hades 360 at Mount Olympus in Wisconsin Dells. I’m in the front row; behind me is my daughter and their girlfriend. We had a very silly trip where we spent an entire weekend at the Dells–which is very much not aimed at pedestrians–with the entirely self-inflicted constraint that we would not get in a car or anything that was not scheduled transit. (We arrived via Amtrak’s beautiful Empire Builder, them from Chicago and me from Saint Paul.)

(One of the relatively new things that is almost certainly an excellent idea for safety is that parks require you to take off your glasses, even if, as with mine, I’ve ridden them on countless coasters without issues. My vision is terrible and so this makes it even more disorienting to do a ride like Hades. If I look like I’m squinting, that’s why.)

I recently learned that my great-grandfather built what appears to be a just massive Ferris wheel for my grandmother and her siblings. I mean, come on:

It’s pre-1930 and in Michigan; I’m told that it was motorized, though that aspect isn’t visible in the photo. If you look closely, you’ll see that here are people on the top and bottom seats; it looks to me like you had to keep your legs out when going through the bottom to avoid hitting the ground.

I also do a radio show for children and have done so for a weirdly long time. Connected with that, I own a small record label that has donated over $200,000 to various non-profits. That photo up top is from me hosting a SXSW showcase in the spring of 2023.

I live in Saint Paul with my wife. Our older kid is doing their Ph.D. in religious studies at Brown University but is also super interested in things like NTSB reports. Our younger kid will graduate from Macalester College in 2024 with music and classics degrees and will probably work in outdoor education. Both the kids like coasters. My wife used to (we went to amusement parks on our honeymoon!) but doesn’t as much any more. Here’s me with the kids at Six Flags Fiesta Texas in 2015.

And here’s Dena and me on the North Shore of Lake Superior in the summer of 2023. We run and hike together a lot, and hey, y’know what? That’s got some risk too.

I’d love to hear from you. My email is down at the bottom there — bill dot Childs at me dot com. If you come to Minnesota, I’ll go to Valleyfair with you or, if you are very lucky with your timing, to the greatest state fair in the land.