Zielinski Law LLCAbout Kevin
Attorney · Professor · Policy Counsel
Carbondale, Illinois
Kevin M. Zielinski is an Illinois attorney (ARDC No. 6354911), a Clinical Assistant Professor of Finance & Economics at Southern Illinois University Carbondale’s College of Business and Analytics, and Associate Counsel for Legal Reform and Oversight at the Institute for Reforming Government. He is the author of Consideration (2026) and writes Counsel Operator, a newsletter on Claude workflows for lawyers.
He came to law by an unusual road. After a B.S. in Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he spent three years in the Doctor of Dental Medicine program at the University of Illinois Chicago before concluding that the day-to-day of general dentistry was not his work. What he had discovered along the way was that he learned best by teaching, so he tutored, at one point twenty-one students a week, for most of a decade. That habit of explanation carried into law school, into the classroom at SIU, and into everything on this site.
He graduated from SIU Simmons Law School in May 2025, where he earned the CALI Award in Advanced Constitutional Law and served as president of the Federalist Society chapter, growing its active membership by more than 4,000 percent. He sat for the Illinois bar in July 2025 and was sworn in on March 17, 2026. He lives in Carbondale with his wife and their two dogs.
At a glance
- Illinois attorney, ARDC No. 6354911 · J.D., SIU Simmons Law School, 2025
- Clinical Assistant Professor of Finance & Economics, SIU College of Business and Analytics
- Associate Counsel for Legal Reform and Oversight, Institute for Reforming Government
- Author, Consideration (2026) · Writer, Counsel Operator
- B.S., Molecular and Cell Biology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Consideration, his first book
A Lawyer’s Field Guide to Money, Markets, and the Rules Underneath Them · First edition, September 2026
Consideration is a field guide to the law underneath the economy. Its forty-four chapters run from what a dollar legally is to how a bank creates money out of nothing, why the Federal Reserve is an administrative agency, and how Article 9 cost one bank $900 million. Later chapters cover insider trading without a statute, bankruptcy as business strategy, and what an AI legally is.
Every chapter pairs a real case or scandal with black-letter rules, worked fact patterns, discussion questions, and flashcards. It is written for law students, business students, practitioners, and anyone who suspects the economy is mostly paperwork.
The first edition, complete in one volume (803 pages), is posted in full on SSRN.
Inside the book
- Part I · Money Is a Legal Fiction (Chapters 1–4)
- Part II · The Firm as a Creature of Statute (5–8)
- Part III · Securities and the Regulatory State (9–13)
- Part IV · The Uniform Commercial Code and the Plumbing of Commerce (14–17)
- Part V · When It Fails (18–21)
- Part VI · Taxes, Crimes, and Other Government Interests (22–25)
- Part VII · People, Property, and the Things Businesses Own (26–30)
- Part VIII · Vice, Chance, and the Regulatory Frontier (31–35)
- Coda · A Field Guide to Reading a Statute Like Money Depends on It (36)
- Part IX · The Machine and the Law (37–44)
- Appendix A · A Prompt Library for Lawyers
The Federalist Society at SIU Simmons
As chapter president in 2024–25, Kevin rebuilt the SIU Simmons Federalist Society from a handful of members into one of the most active student chapters in the region, earning a runner-up FEDI Award for Most-Improved Chapter. The programming was built around open debate on consequential legal questions, with speakers from the bench, the bar, and the executive branch.
Critical Lens on Current Issues
In February 2024, as a second-year law student, Kevin sat on an SIU Simmons Law School panel on the SAFE-T Act’s end of cash bail, which the Illinois Supreme Court had upheld in Rowe v. Raoul (2023). The panelists weighed how pretrial release was working in practice. Alongside him were the Jackson County State’s Attorney, the Carbondale Chief of Police, and the Honorable Jonathan Mitchell. Less than a month later he began his public-interest externship at the Jackson County State’s Attorney’s Office.
His law review article on the Act, “SAFE-T for Whom? Legislative Overreach Transformed Criminals into Victims,” is on SSRN.
