Today's Featured Biography

John Ensminger

After high school, I went on to the University of California at Berkeley, where Patrick Blosser was a classmate. From there I went to Hastings Law School in San Francisco, then moved to New York City and practiced civil rights law, primarily suing mental hospitals in right-to-treatment cases. In the 1980s, I went back to law school (NYU) for an advanced degree in tax law. I then practiced as a tax lawyer, and was the editor of several tax journals, until 2009. Part of my practice involved anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing compliance. I co-authored a treatise on these subjects and consulted concerning terrorist financing after 9/11.

For over a decade now I have been writing and editing books about dogs, including Service and Therapy Dogs in American Society, Police and Military Dogs, Canine Olfaction: Science and Law, and Dogs in California Aboriginal Cultures (the latter a monograph available free online from the California Cultures Monograph Series, Land of Oaks Publishing). I recently edited two manuscripts by Jacob Watts, a missionary and theologian, which concern Christians and Jews in the first century AD. These books, The Field of Ghosts and Memoirs of the Destruction, are available as Kindle books under the name of the author (Jacob Watts, a distant relative of my mother).

I am presently working on a book about the fate of Native American dogs after European conquest. My wife and I will be moving to a condo in Rhinebeck, New York, in a few months with our labradoodle, Chloe, who has retired after ten years as a therapy dog.

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