Laurie Thomas Vass is a North Carolina constitutional economist. Vass is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has an undergraduate degree in Political Science and a Masters degree in Regional Planning. She was a professional money manager with her own investment advisory firm for 30 years, and was cited by Peter Tanous, in The Wealth Equation, as one of the top 100 private managers in the nation. She is the inventor and holder of a research method patent on selecting technology stocks for investment accounts. Vass is the author of ten books, and over 100 scholarly economic articles on the Social Science Research Network author platform. She is currently ranked in the top 1.3% of over 420,000 economic authors, worldwide, on the SSRN platform. Her articles on the SSRN platform are available for free. She is a student of North Carolina history and public policy, and her books and articles about the state are archived in the Carolina Collection, at Wilson Library, at UNC. All of her books are available for purchase at GabbyPress.com