Andy Schoettle began sailing with his brother Michael in Mantoloking, off the Jersey Shore, near Barnegat Bay. He attended college at Princeton and law school at Harvard, where he edited the Harvard Law Review. He also earned MA and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Harvard. Andy Schoettle was an expert in federal and state tax law and policy. After law school graduation he clerked for Judge Learned Hand of the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and then worked for the US Treasury Department in the Office of Tax Legislation Counsel, where he worked for Senator Joseph Clark. Schoettle practiced law from 1963-66 in Philadelphia at Morgan, Lewis & Bockus, but left to join the law faculty at the University of Minnesota in 1967, where he served as a law professor until 2008.